The Hawks Are Gathered

Seek and read from the book of the LORD:  Not one of these shall be missing; none shall be without her mate.  For the mouth of the LORD has commanded, and his Spirit has gathered them. -- Isaiah 34:16

The context of Isaiah 34 appears to be the certainty of God’s wrath falling upon the descendants of Esau in retaliation for Edom’s animosity and frequent treachery toward their Semite cousins in Israel.  Judgment will fall and the land of Edom will be turned over to the various wild beasts and birds for there will be no human inhabitants to trouble or disturb those creatures. 

Looking at verse 16 from this perspective, we see that the Spirit of God will gather all those creatures to overrun and inhabit the desolated territory.  There are numerous prophecies alluding to this so a person can go through the Scriptures and see that each creature listed will indeed be present with its mate, ready to multiply in the absence of human dwellers. 

Or, consider the birds and beasts as manifestations of the prophetic word.  We can find these words in the “book of the LORD”.  None of God’s words will fall to the ground to be lost or fail.  Each word He has spoken will have its “mate” – its fulfillment.  The Holy Spirit works to gather those words into the Holy Scripture – so that we may trust it to be truly the word of God.  But He also works to bring about the complement, to cause the word to come to pass. 

If an owl or a hawk, a porcupine or a hyena is used by the Spirit to fulfill and complete the word of God, are we thinking too highly of ourselves and those around us if we think that He is working in us to build the kingdom, to accomplish His will and to live out His truth in this world?  The Word is alive in His people. 

An owl, being a creature of instinct, will tend to follow the opening that is before it apart from hesitation caused by caution.  We, as creatures of intellect, imagination, and will, made in the image and likeness of God, may choose to rebel against the Spirit’s urgings.  Kind of a sad thought, isn’t it?  I suspect there are many, unaware of the Spirit’s work among them, thinking to do their own will, who end up furthering the purposes of a God they disdain.  Origen says that Christ was put on the Cross by God, by man, and by the devil, but the intentions were vastly different. 

Whether we are aware of it or not, the Lord has called to us and spoken to us about our destiny, in Scripture, in circumstances, and from the lips of those around us.  If we are willing to follow Him, not one of those words will be missing from our lives and each will be present with its fulfillment. 

Inspiration and Scripture

All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable.  This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet:   “I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.” – Matthew 13:34-35

I, somewhat facetiously, said a day or two ago that we know it is God and not goddess because He lays out the rules plainly.  That’s true enough about the Law.  Do this and you will live.  Do that, and it is death.  Yet life has both its pedestrian, masculine side and its exotic, mysterious, feminine side.  When it comes to what we are to be rather than only what we must do, we find the Lord talking about seeds and weeds and bread and vines. 

That’s the way that it works.  The Bible is not informational, certainly not solely informational.  It is not a book of facts or a flight schedule that tells us which plane to board for a trip to heaven.  That kind of thinking leads to the misunderstandings of extreme fundamentalism, of eschatological date-setting, of accusations of heresy over how long it took God to create the cosmos.  Has the sun indeed set on the Sixth?

I think the Bible is inspired literature.  I think the writers wrote, sometimes, lists of names because they were scribes and that is what scribes did.  I think Paul wrote greetings, salutations, and personal details in his Epistles because an epistle is a letter to one’s friends or potential friends.  Romans is possibly the richest Epistle in terms of doctrine but can we say it is more inspired than the simple little note Paul dashed off to Philemon about a useless runaway slave named Onesimus*? 

When a person becomes a Christian, he or she is baptized in symbolic death and resurrection.  God does not pull a man from the game and send in an angel to replace him.  Instead, by His Spirit, Christ comes to dwell in the man, in that flesh, though it be abused and wounded, even crippled and scarred.  We could all change our names to Christopher, for we are all Christ-bearers.  God makes new men out of old by inspiration in the fullest sense of the word.  As He breathed into red clay the Breath of Life, and Adam became a living soul, so the Holy Breath sanctifies the flawed and weak material bodies of those who will trust Him today.  We become sanctuaries of the Living God.

Are we surprised, then, that He took what is, in places, fairly prosaic literature and inspires it that His Spirit might make of it sacred Scripture?  It seems like something God would do.  He speaks to us through and by the limitations, the prejudices, and the flaws of those who wrote.  Like us they were but jars of clay, and, also like us, jars filled with an unimaginable treasure.  Whatever was in their minds as the pen moved, whatever the conditions that motivated them, whatever the context, though it may help us in understanding the language, does not limit the meaning. 

*For those who might not know, Paul has a little fun with the name Onesimus which means, literally, useful.  See verse 11 -- Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful to you and to me.