What the Selah!

Eugene Peterson, one of the best living Christian wordsmiths, offers this humorous take on the meaning of Selah--an oft repeated word in the Psalms--of which biblical scholars still can't figure out the meaning:

"Lacking a clear consensus from the scholars I have felt free to offer the less scholarly but more entertaining suggestion that Selah is a Philistine expletive that David learned during those hard years when he was banished from Saul's court and knocking around with ruffians and outlaws in the wilderness. He used it whenever he broke a string on his harp." Answering God, 148.

I like it.

Selah.

Process of Becoming a Pharisee

Eugene Peterson on the process of becoming a Pharisee:

"[Phariseeism is the] slow change from an interior passion to an exterior performance and the shift of attention from the majesty of God to house cleaning for God." (p. 212, The Jesus Way)

Faith and Mount Moriah - Eugene Peterson

This chapter from Eugene Peterson's The Jesus Way is a wonderfully piercing picture of the Abraham testing, the Abraham faith, and the God of Abraham:

"We need testing. God tests us. The test results will show whether we are choosing the way of awe and worship and obedience (which is to say, God), or whether, without being aware of it, we are reducing God to our understanding of him so that we can use him. Have we slipped into the habit of insisting that God do what we ask or want or need him to do, treating him as an idol designed for our satisfaction? Does God serve us or do we serve God? Do we require a God that we can fully understand and control or are we willing to be obedient to what we do not understand and could never control? Is God a mystery of goodness whom we embrace and trust, or is God a formula for getting the most out of life on our terms? The test results will show whether we have been blithely assuming that God is pledged to give us whatever we want whenever we ask. Have we thought all along that God is there to serve us? The test will tell us. Do we want God in our own image or do we want the God who is beyond us and over us, who we trust will do for us what only God can do in the way that only God can do it--no strings attached...no reservations...no caveats...the whole hog? The test will tell us.

And we will be glad enough to have the test results so that we can get on with the resurrection-shaped life God has for us. This does not always happen without some pain, for we can get very attached to our little projects of self-deification, but it doesn't take us long to be glad to have gotten rid of them.

Nothing in our Scriptures is as demanding on our faith as the Akedah, this Binding of Isaac, narrated in such bare but excruciating detail as to leave no doubt that the stakes are eternally high. We ask, 'Why this quite unimaginable severity at Moriah?' Isn't there another way?...Soren Kierkegaard in his passionate search for an authentic life of faith probed the Moriah test relentlessly and left no room for an easy detour, a comfortable alternative. He warns against every attempt to trivialize faith into a vacation getaway in the mountains, or a place of influence in the city, or an entertainment park in the suburbs. The way of faith does not serve our fantasies, our illusions, or our ambitions. Faith is not the way to God on our terms, it is the way of God to us on his terms.

A three-day walk to Mount Moriah exposes the banality of all such bogus faith. At Mount Moriah we accept and worship a God beyond our understanding. At Mount Moriah we embrace a mystery that is light-filled, but no less a mystery for all that.

Abraham and the Akedah: the Christian way cannot be programmed, cannot be guaranteed: faith means that we put our trust in God--and we don't know how he will work out our salvation, only that it is our salvation that he is working out. Which frees us for anything. We must be the ones tied down, so that we can be the one's set free..." (p. 54-55)

Living for the Glory of God - Owen & Peterson

"Living for the glory of God" is so easily assumed, so easily said, in the Christian life. John Owen, Puritan of old, knew this, and in his work on sin and temptation reminds us that "the glory of God" is not simply in generalities but its in the specifics.

And men may persuade themselves that they have a general design for the glory of God, when they have no active principle in particular duties tending at all that way. But if, instead of fixing the mind by faith on the peculiar advancing the glory of God in a duty, the soul contents itself with a general notion of doing so, the mind is already diverted and drawn off from its charge by the deceitfulness of sin. If a man be traveling in a journey, it is not only required of him that he bend his course that way, and so go on; but if he attend not unto every turning, and other occurrences in his way, he may wander and neve4r come to his journey's end. And if we suppose that in general we aim at the glory of God, as we all profess to do, yet if we attend not unto it distinctly upon every duty that occurs in our way, we shall never attain the end aimed at. Ed. Justin Taylor..., Overcoming Sin & Temptation, p. 319

Eugene Peterson, a living author, speaks to the same issue, in his recent The Jesus Way:

The relation between ends (where we are going) and means (how we get there) is a basic distinction in science, technology, philosophy, morality, and spirituality. Fitting the right means to the desired ends is required in virtually everything we do, from things as simple as getting across the street and frying an egg to the complexities involved in a mission to the moon or writing a novel. But here's the thing: the means have to be both adequate to and congruent with the end. Means have to fit ends. Otherwise everything falls apart.

It is far easier to decide on a desired end, a goal, than it is to acquire adequate means...But finding the means for reaching the goal, achieving that identity, is a matter of diligent concentration, responsible perseverance, and keen discernment.

Discernment of means adequate for living to the glory of God and congruent with our identity as baptized Christians has always been demanding, which is why the biblical writers use the metaphor of way so frequently. But with the unprecedented proliferation of technology, discernment makes demands on us in a way not anticipated by our biblical writers. For us technology has taken over the business of means. Technology has a monopoly, at least in the minds of most, on answering questions regarding means. But technology for the most part restricts the term to matters visible: the means for making cars, getting to London, amassing a fortune, winning a game, killing the enemy. It is a very impressive monopoly. In our awed admiration we hardly notice that there is little skill or wisdom or concern given to the way we actually live. A technologized world knows how to make things, knows how to get places, but is not conspicuous for living well.

My concern is that the prominence of the way in our Scriptures and traditions, showing us how to glorify God and realize our baptismal identity, has been transferred in contemporary life into way of getting money, getting jobs, and getting power. The authority of Scripture and Jesus in discerning and employing means has been taken over by technology, the god Technology. And this proliferation of technology obscures the vital organic connections between means and ends in everything that permeates our ordinary living. When technology calls the shots in matters of means, 'standard of living' has nothing to do with how well we live, only with how much money we spend annually.

The way in which Jesus is the Way is not a matter of style or expedience. Nor is it a generality, a vague pointing in an upward direction. Prayerfully and scripturally attentive, Jesus deliberately chose the ways he would live. If we choose to follow him, we must be just as prayerful, scripturally attentive, and deliberate. The other ways are no ways...

So. Jesus the Way, the ways of Jesus. He shows the way. He also is the way...

Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus is the way we come to God. Jesus is the way God comes to us. And not first one and then the other but both at the same time. Not God's way to us on Sundays and our way to God on weekdays. It is a two-lane road. Much mischief has been perpetrated in the Christian community by not keeping both lanes open. The road up and the road down are the same road. (p. 27-28, 38.)