“For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe” (1 Corinthians 1:21).

We Christians read this and shake our heads at the philosophers of this world. We say, they can mind-screw all they want but they will never know God through philosophy. For God has wisely (and very cleverly too!) ordained that the knowledge of his secrets and of his Person cannot be gleaned through the overeducated conceptual gymnastics of Nietzsche and Sartre.

But a disturbing possibility arises in my mind. What if Paul is addressing us! What if he means to warn Christian academics, not just pagan academics? In our schools of Christian training, we do a lot of talking about the gospel. It’s as if we think that if we only fine-tune our descriptions enough, we can know God better at the end of it than if we imbibe the Word itself.

God, on the other hand, says plainly that he is not known through wisdom. He is known through “foolishness.” He says His foolish Word is power (2:4-5). Tough concept: Word as power.

Maybe our heart is in the right place. We want to mount a credible defense of the gospel for our colleagues in the Ivy Leagues—something they can understand. If we package it in their categories, maybe they’ll respect us. (And it feels so good when they respect us.). The way they talk over there is so fine. They have systems, they have pleasing complicatedness. I heard a lecture I didn’t understand a word of! It was wonderful! Whereas the bare gospel sounds so, well . . . foolish.

Before you know it, the “foolish” message of Christ starts to wrap itself in a kind of midrash. We do more midrash talking than “foolish” talking. Paul, he spoke like a fool (1 Corinthians 4:10). We always mean to go out there and speak like a “fool” too eventually. But somehow, when we adjourn from class and all file into the café, we’re still all talking midrash. We’re so used to it. No one dares pipe up and say, “Guess what the Lord is doing in my life!” It would be embarrassing.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it, and it is not neo-orthodoxy or bad exegesis but good sense: Whenever you read Scripture, Old Testament or New, you should ask yourself, “What is God saying to me?” This has many benefits, not the least of which is as a safeguard for you, keeping you from the subtle and dangerous alchemy that turns the Word of God into discussable theology, rendering it ineffective in your life. Scripture illustrates:

“As for you, son of man, your people who talk together about you by the walls and at the doors of the houses, say to one another, each to his brother, ‘Come, and hear what the word is that comes from the Lord.’ And they come to you as people come, and they sit before you as my people, and they hear what you say but they will not do it. . . . You are to them like one who sings lustful songs with a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument, for they hear what you say, but they will not do it . . .” (Ezekiel 33:30-32).

These are people like you and me, who show up to church and to retreats and who take copious notes in their notebooks.

I have discovered a disturbing principle of communication that specifically applies to the Word of God: When you hear a message from Him, if you receive it as interesting information rather than personal command, it not only does you no good, but further hardens you in your ability to receive revelation. This is why Jesus solemnly warns, “Take care then how you hear, for to the one who has, more will be given, and from the one who has not, even what he thinks he has will be taken away” (Luke 8:18). This is also why He tells the story of the seed that fell to the ground and was immediately snatched away by birds (Luke 8:5,12). Use it or lose it.

“And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it” (Revelation 12:4). Even at the birthing stool, Satan was present with talons sharpened, to render the Christ child dead on arrival. Having failed at that manger scene, he now contents himself to render God’s Word DOA in our hearts as it comes to us in sermons or in our private devotions. Behind the sensate curtain of reality, a dark presence hovers over the place of most promise, the imminent birthings of new life and insight in Christ. The only antidote I have found to the poison is to pray over God’s Word even as I am reading it, to thank Him for the truth I am hearing, and to put it into practice at once, either by doing or by praying my assent.

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Q&A time after a Bible lecture is a good thing, I suppose, but there is a downside. If the speaker has delivered a well-prepared, prayer-bathed, edifying message, one could wish for time to let it linger a while, like a fine wine. Or like the last note of a perfect symphony hangs there, filled with longing, longing for more of the voice of God.

But then come the off-the-wall questions. The floor is thrown open for responses, and there is a strong social taboo against dead air time, and an equally strong imperative to have something to ask. With the very first question, a message that took hours to write and days to meditate on is swept from the collective mind like cobwebs, its fine seed never to be planted and germinate. One hand, then another, shoots up, challenging some point that was made in the talk, suggesting that it lacks nuance or needs qualification or is downright unscriptural. Other hands chase a rabbit down some new trail, and the scent of the old is lost forever.

The same dynamic happens in blog posts I have read. I was, today, mischievously imagining the minced meat that commenters would make of some of Jesus’ or Paul’s statements if they were posted online. Consider:

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men.” (This is, of course, 1 Corinthians 1:25, but let us suppose we do not know that.)

The 9 a.m. commenter fires the first salvo: “God is not foolish! He is not weak! It is irreverent to suggest that there is any degree of those qualities in God!!! He is all wisdom and strength. . . .”

The 9:17 comment interacts: “Perhaps the post is just making a point about God being higher than men. Still, this is not a fortuitous use of language. . . .”

At 9:40 we read, “I heard a lecture the other day on ‘open theism.’ Interesting theological development. Do you think God knows the future ahead of time, or do you think He learns it along with us? Is it possible that His willful ignorance of the future is the ‘weakness’ of God? . . .”

And the poor poster’s contribution is long left in the dust. No attempt is made to see the point he or she was trying to make; no attempt is made to listen with love and wisdom. The Enlightenment casts a long shadow. For the next post, lets try this one:

“You know that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.” (Don’t tell anyone it’s James 2:24.)

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Over breakfast, a friend of mine who is single shared the counsel she received from an older married woman, who told her that the “gushy-gooeys” (her word) don’t last, but it’s the friendship you want in marriage.

I was all set to nod appreciatively when I remembered that these days I am making a concerted effort to let the Word of God judge the word of man. (You think Thoreau lived “intentionally.”) So I stopped and said to my friend: “Does God say that about marriage?” We thought about it together and came up with the Song of Solomon as counter-evidence—unless you want to go with the far-fetched idea that God would play bait-and-switch on us.

Then I told her about how my brother and his wife are still in love after 33 years. I’m sure there are other examples, but you only need one, don’t you. In fact, you don’t even need one: “Let God be true, though every man a liar” (Romans 3:4). That is the challenge in a nutshell: against all the supposed data to the contrary, to stick to the Word of God.

If you cock your ear today, you will hear many things that people say—unexamined and unchallenged folk wisdom straight from the pit of hell (James 3:15). You will hear it on the street, and you will hear it between your ears while driving the car and folding the laundry. The opposition described in Galatians 5:16-17 is an active and continuous warfare in the spirit realm, not a formal principle. Deal with it as a formal principle (i.e., don’t deal with it), and you will lose the war by forfeit.

God says, “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2). The mind is transformed as it aligns itself to God’s Word, the only reliable touchstone. Take captive every renegade thought (2 Corinthians 10:5), run it by the Word, and watch out for well-meaning little old ladies.

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I usually put on my seminary-sophisticate glasses when reading Old Testament prophecy, automatically translating “horses” into guided missiles and IEDs. But this morning, for a change, as I read Ezekiel 38 and 39, I mused about a more literal interpretation.

The chapters describe a time in the future when an array of nations will attack an Israel at peace:

“You will come from your place out of the uttermost parts of the north, you and many peoples with you, all of them riding on horses, a great host, a mighty army. You will come up against my people Israel, like a cloud covering the land. In the latter days I will bring you against my land, that the nations may know me, when through you, O Gog, I vindicate my holiness before their eyes” (38:15-16).

Then my friend David phoned from Michigan and told me the economy is so bad there that rather than repairing deteriorating roads, they’re crushing them up and reverting to gravel—a sort of reversal of modernity, a descent into pre-industrial (if not prehistoric) times.

I checked it out and sure enough, President Obama’s stimulus package didn’t quite stretch thin enough to cover all the needs of the state with the nation’s highest rate of unemployment. Back in June 2009, the Chicago Tribune was reporting that “more than 20 of the 83 counties in Michigan . . . have turned rural roads back to gravel with no immediate plans to repave.”

On Jan. 29 of this year, an editorial in The Detroit News noted, “Michigan’s transportation department has chopped 243 badly needed road repair projects out of its five-year-plan because it can’t afford them. . . .”

This all raises interesting questions for my smugly modernist biblical hermeneutics. What if “horses” means “horses”? What if this slow motion train wreck of an economy we find ourselves in is heading us for a time more like our Caveman ancestors than our Jetsons fantasies?

Roughly 2,800 years ago there was a famine in Samaria, brought about by a Syrian siege. It was so severe that the population was reduced to cannibalism. It was so severe that when the word of the Lord promised through the prophet Elisha that the very next day flour would be so plentiful that it would drive the price down, a sophisticated man scoffed at the divine prediction. Sure enough, God found a way, and the very next day, flour was cheap. You can read all a

bout it in 2 Kings 6 and 7.All of which gives me pause about going too quickly to an overly intellectual reading of biblical prophecies. For all I know—and the way things are going—“horses” may turn out to be “horses” in the end. We may be living in The Book of Eli. It’s not what I wish, and it’s not the wish of Tim Hammill, managing director of the Dickinson County Road Commission in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, “where 2.5 miles of paved road was converted to gravel last year.” Says Hammill, “It’s depressing.”

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We are told that Enoch “walked with God, and he was not, for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). Talk about a teasingly sketchy biography. Wouldn’t you like to know what went on in that relationship? Then there was Abraham, the “friend of God” (2 Chronicles 20:7; Isaiah 41:8; James 2:23). With everyone else, God spoke in riddles, but with Moses, “face to face” (Exodus 33:11). King David’s recorded prayers sound to me like love songs, while everybody else’s prayers sound like . . . prayers.

Here and there, even among the saved, God has his special friends. Who gets to be in this exclusive club? Partly I want to answer that God chooses his friends. Partly I want to answer that James 2:23 gives a clue to criterion for admission into this sweet divine confidence: “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.”

Is God so rarely believed? I don’t know, but I have friends who are involved in what I can only call “friendships” with God. I mark their prayer life, and several uncommon things characterize it: continuity, creativity, and confidence.

My friend Kathleen needed to fly to St. Louis from Houston. She had a little over $200 and needed plane tickets for four people. Tickets were running about $200 each, round-trip. Therefore she needed $800 and was $600 short—but she had to go. So she knelt down and laid out her money on the bed to show God, and she asked Him to provide. A few days later, her husband called and told her that Southwest Airlines was celebrating its 25^th anniversary, and for one week, ticket prices would be $25 one way. So she bought four round-trip tickets for $200 plus tax.

This is no anomaly for Kathleen. She lives in what I can only describe as a “zone.” I once heard that the difference between Christians can be compared to travelers gathered at the edge of a frozen pond that they must cross. They have it on good authority that the ice is solid. But even with that testimony, some will only crawl out inch by inch on hands and knees, while others will bound onto the silvery skin with boldness and delight.

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I keep a Bible on my nightstand and memorize verses to fall asleep. It works pretty well, and I find I’m usually out before the job is jot-and-tittle perfect. Last night’s selection was Colossians 3:12-16:

“Put on, then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly. . . .”

Intertwined with this ponderous phrase by phrase assimilation was another stream of thought: “Why didn’t David phone yesterday?”

The way that harmonic thread was developing was thus: “He will probably call tomorrow and will say he’s sorry and that he was up against a deadline with an important project. And then I will say—in a very calm and unfrazzled manner—that I would have thought he would have been concerned for me driving home in a blizzard through Maryland and Delaware. And moreover, there are times when I have talked to him when a deadline loomed. . . . (You can see that David is hardly necessary to this conversation since I have it all mapped out already without him.)

At some point as I lay flat on my back, the two strains of internal monologue (plus Bob Dylan’s “Mozambique” still stuck in my head) intersected and I could not escape a momentary embarrassment. “Compassionate hearts,” “kindness,” “humility,” “meekness,” “bearing with,” “if one has a complaint, forgiving,” “love,” “peace,” “be thankful”—all seemed to be in collision with my agenda for the next morning.

“This is different,” I rebutted to myself. I would be compassionate and meek and humble and forbearing and thankful and have peace normally, but I need to go down this line of inquiry with David to make known my feelings and to know what the deal is with him. Once that’s done I will resume meekness and forbearance and peace and thankfulness and forgiveness.

The unrelenting contrapuntal strain once more asserted itself: “There is no excuse clause in Colossians 3:12-16. There are no exceptions for applying these commands in cases where one has something to lose by obeying them. There is always the issue of self-protection to defeat. What’s really going on here is that you want to get your own back because you don’t believe God has your back if you do it his way. This, in spite of the fact that you’ve been praying piously every day Moses’ prayer: ‘Show my your ways, that I may know you in order to find favor in your sight” (Exodus 33:13).’’

This, I finally perceived, is where all obedience falters—where one finds a reason why the Word of God applies to everybody else but me.

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I just read the novel The Attack by Yasmina Khadra, nom de plume of Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former Algerian army officer. It is a beautifully written story about Amin Jaafari, a Palestinian (non-practicing Muslim) who happens to be a surgeon and Israeli citizen in Tel Aviv—if you can wrap your mind around that complicated identity. The plot concerns the nightmarish revelation that his dear wife has just blown herself up in a restaurant for the Palestinian cause. She had guarded her political zeal and connections even from the marriage bed.

But none of these political issues are the impetus of today’s column. Rather, having immersed myself in Middle Eastern sights and smells—the spice markets, the roasted nuts and tahini and hanging legs of lamb—as well as its existential tribulations for a week, I found I emerged, rather unconsciously at first, with a different context for reading the Bible. Yesterday while making my way through Philippians I noticed I was importing a whole new weltanschauung into Paul’s letter from prison, his attitude, his boldness, his determination, his unbowed zeal for the Cause. I realized this was more like a modern Palestinian’s or Israeli’s perspective on life than a modern New Yorker’s or Nebraskan’s.

One cannot entirely help (but maybe we should try to help it!) filtering one’s Scripture reading through one’s own culture. But some cultures must be a better fit than others. I feel quite certain that a Taliban man who comes to Christ will see a much more rigorous call to total consecration in the commands of Jesus and the appeals of Paul than I have been wont to see. The upshot of my little cultural wading in the world of Dr. Amin Jaafari has been, somehow, that I understand I have not even begun to live seriously for Christ.

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What is the purpose of getting together with friends? Well, in a sense the word “purpose” is already wrongheaded. As C.S. Lewis noted, friendship is the most unnecessary of the Loves—like flowers, like music. Nevertheless, if we scratch the surface of our chosen friendships we detect a purpose or a calculation for the company we keep.

I have sometimes dreaded certain parties or meetings or highbrow conferences, and I have lately identified my lack of enthusiasm as a distaste for “small talk.” Partly this is sin on my part: lovelessness, laziness, self-centeredness, fear of man. But to the extent that it is a legitimate dislike, I have taken to praying before get-togethers that the Holy Spirit will be the unseen presence in the group and will be working something special for the Kingdom of God.

Today I was affirmed in my antipathy for small talk—and assuaged of no little guilt—by a statement of the Apostle Paul, who expressed his purpose for wanting to visit the Roman Christians: “For I long to see you, that I might impart to you some spiritual gift to strengthen you—that is, that we may be mutually encouraged by each other’s faith, both yours and mine” (Romans 1:11-12).

So then, it’s a good thing and not a sinful thing to long for conversations that are spiritually meaningful. I don’t mean these talks have to be happy and non-confrontational, either. Confrontation is fine. Rebuke is fine. Much harder work for me than both is the studied avoidance of all meaningful intercourse.

Next week I am meeting with Kathleen. I am not a cessationist when it comes to spiritual gifts because I see that Kathleen has the gift of prophecy. I come away from our coffee dates knocked off my feet on the road to Damascus. It’s wonderful, it’s not-to-be-missed. It’s oil and perfume and all the rest of Proverbs 27:9.

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I haven’t seen the movie The Book of Eli but I have read the book How the Irish Saved Civilization. Thomas Cahill’s work describes how the island people preserved Western civilization from being entirely lost, copying Bibles as fast as their hands could write while barbarians were running around torching the libraries of Europe. I understand that Eli is also about protecting the Bible (though reviews suggest the idea is books in general, which may be so).

All this was marinating in my brain this morning as I happened to read Jeremiah 36 and plunged into a little fantasy of my own.

The seventh century B.C. prophet records a scene that would seem odd transposed in our day. God has commanded Jeremiah to commit to a scroll all the pronouncements of judgment (as well as future restoration) that he has been announcing (with very little to show for it) for decades to the stiff-necked Israelites. Jeremiah has his friend Baruch take dictation. Then he dispatches Baruch to read the scroll aloud in the temple, in a last desperate hope that the people will repent and yet avert God’s wrath.

The part that strikes me as delightfully odd is that the princes actually listen. Somebody important at court named Michaiah overhears Baruch’s reading, and grabs him and hauls him off to the scribe’s chamber in the king’s house, where at a hastily assembled clandestine meeting he has him reread all the words he just read to Elishama, and Delaiah, and Elnathan, and Gemariah, etcetera. These hang on every syllable, and the men confer and agree that these words must be brought to the attention of the king himself.

What a refreshing idea—that God’s word is not just pretty or poetry or devotional material or a quiet-time ritual or inspiring, but urgent. If we don’t get this right, we’re dead men!

Since 2010 appears to be the year of the apocalyptic Hollywood film (The Road, 2012, The Book of Eli), I would like to suggest for next month’s offering a script based on Jeremiah 36. It has all the elements we need for an end times plot, based as it is on the final days of Judah before its destruction by Nebuchadnezzar. Oh, that our own nation—from the greatest to the least—would tremble at God’s every word the way Eli did, and the way the princes of Israel did. Someone get a Bible to Capitol Hill and 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, quick. There may yet be time.

“But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word” (Isaiah 66:2).

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.