Bridging The Gap

5 March, 20166 March, 2016Marissa

In the beginning Adam and Eve had a face-to-face relationship with God. They they sinned, creating a gap between them and their creator that was renewed each time a human broke God’s law. God was still there, but we kept moving farther and farther away.

Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; nor His ear heavy, that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear. (Is. 59:1-2)

Throughout the time period covered by the Old Testament books, it appears few people had a relationship with God. In every case, that relationship existed because God stepped across the gap and initiated the relationship. He called Abraham, Isaac and Jacob into covenant with Him. He spoke to Moses out of the burning bush. He chose David as king over Israel. He called the prophets individually.

Today, God also has to take the first steps in any relationship we have with Him. Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6) and also, “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him” (John 6:44). To have a relationship with Yeshua we must be called by the Father, and to know the Father we have to go through Yeshua.

Several months ago, there was a handout at my Messianic congregation with a “Thought Of The Week” printed on the back talking about just this topic. It started out discussing Jacob’s ladder, then human attempts to bridge the gap between God and man by building things like towers. Such attempts are futile, but

The same might be said of all our religious impulses. The stars are always beyond our reach. God is far distant. Man’s best attempts to bridge the gap fail. … If we are to ascend to God, we must ascend upon a ladder that He Himself has extended to us from above.”

We can’t do anything that will make us worthy of God’s attention. All our “religious impulses” — going to church every week, singing worship songs, preaching, or even doing works like healings — aren’t going to make Jesus let us into the kingdom (Matt. 7:22-23). The only thing we can do is respond when God extends us a way to know Him.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed (Rom. 3:23-25)

Jesus is the ladder “extended to us from above” by God the Father. He “came down from heaven” (John 6:38) to pay the price for our sins and “draw all men to” Himself (John 12:32). Because we could not reach Him, he came to us.

The Hebrew word for “bless” also means to kneel. No matter how many good works we climb up on or how hard we stretch toward heaven, we won’t reach God. Yet He blessed us by kneeling down to our level and welcoming us into a relationship through Jesus Christ.

Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom also we have access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God. (Rom. 5:1-2)

Because of what Jesus has done and is doing, we can reach God. Through Him, we “have access by one Spirit to the Father” (Eph. 2:18). We can come to Them with absolute confidence that They love us and want a relationship with us. They’ve proved that time and again throughout history by making covenants with people, building friendships with men like Abraham (Jas. 2:23), pleading with Their loved ones to come back, kneeling down to die in our place, and now living and walking with us.

Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. (Heb. 4:14-16)

Jesus bridged the gap once and for all with His sacrifice that “perfected forever those who are being sanctified” (Heb. 10:14). He gave us access to God and “boldness to enter the Holiest” by making us holy (Heb. 10:19-22). “Now we are children of God” (1 John 3:2), and we can come to Him just as a child who knows their loving Father always has time to pick them up and listen to their concerns.

Myers-Briggs: Fad or Science?

29 February, 201620 March, 2018Marissa

Friends who know I blog about Myers Briggs types sometimes send me links to people critiquing the MBTI and ask what I think. The arguments in videos like “Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless” and articles such as “Goodbye to MBTI, the Fad That Won’t Die” tend to follow a similar pattern and hit the same points:

Kathryn Brigs and Isabel Briggs Myers had no formal training.
The test doesn’t allow for complex personalities or that someone can be a little bit of an extrovert and a little bit of an introvert at the same time.
Similarly, the judging-perceiving, thinking-feeling, and sensing-intuition “scales” don’t allow for people who use both.
About 50% of people who take the test twice within 5 weeks get different results.
Test fails to predict success in various jobs and doesn’t provide meaningful data.
The test remains popular because it only gives positive results. These results are vague and hard to argue with, much like astrology and pseudoscience.

Disclaimer: some of the links in this post are affiliate links. This means that, at no additional cost to you, I will receive a commission if you click on the link and make a purchase on that website.

Setting aside the first arguments for now, I think these points are a good criticism of some of the free tests going around which make people pick just between the four letter groups. None of this, however, takes into account the science behind Myers-Briggs. In fact, if the critics would bother reading Isabel Myers’ book Gifts Differing,* they would find most of their points have nothing to do with actual Myers-Briggs theory.

The Truth About Extroverts and Introverts

The video I linked above correctly states that Jung’s theory allowed for people who didn’t fit neatly into a single category. But then they say Kathryn Briggs and Isabel Myers “took Jung’s types but slightly altered the terminology and changed it so every single person was assigned only one possibility or another. You couldn’t be a little bit of an extrovert or a little bit of an introvert.”

In fact, this a complete misrepresentation of Myers-Briggs theory. Read more →

Weightier Matters

27 February, 201617 August, 2016Marissa

The scribes and Pharisees had a lot going for then. They were well-educated, well-respected, and held positions of authority in the community of believers. People thought they were important, and they were. Then this guy Jesus showed up and started condemning them for not following God correctly.

Can you imagine how this looked? Here are these men who’ve been the authority on worship tradition for years confronted by a young carpenter who just appeared out of nowhere. He didn’t even go to a good school! Worse, they know He’s right. But if they admit it, they lose their power.

weighty_matters — photo credit: Michael Coghlan “It Hangs in the Balance,” CC BY-SA

A similar thing can happen in our churches today. When leadership is focused on maintaining church tradition, there’s a danger of developing a Pharisaical attitude. A certain amount of resistance to change is needed to keep from forsaking sound doctrine, but often church tradition isn’t rooted in the Bible at all and if that’s the case it’s fair-game for reexamination. We can also, as the Pharisees did, error in emphasizing certain doctrines to the neglect of others. Read more →

Searching For Balance

22 February, 201622 February, 2016Marissa

I’ve been rather preoccupied with the idea of Balance lately, both in the world around me and internally. A lack of balance frustrates me so much and yet many people seem to gravitate toward polarities rather than searching for middle ground.

Searching For Balance | marissabaker.wordpress.com — scales credit: StockMonkeys.com

Let’s look at Christianity for a quick example. I’m not sure if this is the case in your churches, but in the groups I attend the question of Sacred Names comes up every once in a while. One the one hand, you have people who only use the Hebrew names like Yahweh and Yeshua and claim others “have rejected the name of their God.” I’ve even heard of people who won’t talk with other Christians unless they can pronounce the sacred names “correctly” (which varies depending on who you talk with). Then on the other hand, you have people who say Sacred Namers have fallen into “a satanic doctrine that leads people into idolatry.”

It just seems so ridiculous to me. To the first claim, if God wanted us all speaking Hebrew He wouldn’t have confused the languages at the tower of Babel. Read more →

Covenants of Righteousness and Mercy

20 February, 201616 December, 2020Marissa

This isn’t the first time a Bible study has brought tears to my eyes. Usually that happens when I’m studying God’s love, but there’s also something inspiring, humbling and wonderful about His righteousness and mercy. They’re aspects of God’s essential character, and the more I learn about who the Father and Yeshua are, the more inclined I feel to just sit here in awe.

In Matthew 5:48 Jesus said, “you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” We have a responsibility to grow toward perfection, developing God’s character inside us. If we’re going to mimic His character, we have to study and learn about who and what He is, so we can display those traits as well.

I’ve already written many posts on this blog about “God is love” (there’s even a whole ebook free if you click here), so that’s not what we’re going to focus on today. Instead, I want to spend our time together this Sabbath focusing on two key character traits that are aspects of God’s love.

The Lord is Righteous

If you search for the phrases “the Lord is …” and “God is …” trying to find descriptions of His character, the first you come to is in Exodus.

And Pharaoh sent and called for Moses and Aaron, and said to them, “I have sinned this time. The Lord is righteous, and my people and I are wicked. (Ex. 9:27)

Even a pagan ruler on the receiving end of God’s judgement recognized that “the Lord is righteous.” In Hebrew, the word is tsaddiyq (H6662). For human beings, righteousness involves fulfilling the commands of God. It “consisted in obedience to God’s law and conformity to God’s nature” (Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, entry 1879). Like love, righteousness isn’t just something God shows toward us — it is one of His essential character traits. We define righteousness by pointing to God’s standard.

“Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord, “That I will raise to David a Branch of righteousness; a King shall reign and prosper, and execute judgment and righteousness in the earth. In His days Judah will be saved, and Israel will dwell safely; now this is His name by which He will be called: THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS. (Jer. 23:5-6)

Not only is God Himself righteous, but all our righteousness is found in Him. This prophecy points to Christ’s role as the one who makes us righteous. Only by following in Yahweh Tsidkenu’s footsteps can we continue in righteousness.

As we’ve seen, God’s righteousness is closely connected to His law. It follows that as a Being of righteousness He must institute penalties for disobedience as well as rewards for obedience. Daniel recognized this in his prayer for the exiles.

As it is written in the Law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us; yet we have not made our prayer before the Lord our God, that we might turn from our iniquities and understand Your truth. Therefore the Lord has kept the disaster in mind, and brought it upon us; for the Lord our God is righteous in all the works which He does, though we have not obeyed His voice. (Dan. 9:13-14)

It is righteous for God to let evil befall a nation that broke their covenant with Him. Covenants aren’t just about the good things both parties get out of the agreement — they also include consequences for breaking the covenant, which is what we do when we sin (Dan. 9:4-5). Because God is righteous, He keeps the entire covenant — including the part that stipulates consequences for sin.

The Lord is Mercy

Daniel also calls on another of God’s essential character traits; one that goes hand-in-hand with righteousness.

And I prayed to the Lord my God, and made confession, and said, “O Lord, great and awesome God, who keeps His covenant and mercy with those who love Him, and with those who keep His commandments, we have sinned and committed iniquity, we have done wickedly and rebelled, even by departing from Your precepts and Your judgments. …

O Lord, righteousness belongs to You, but to us shame of face … because we have sinned against You. To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against Him. (Dan. 9:4-5, 7, 9)

If God was not mercy as well as righteousness, we would be in grave straits indeed. We have all sinned, and if God righteously rewarded us for that we would all be dead (Rom. 3:23; 6:23). Yet Jesus Christ took on Himself the death penalty required by covenant. Instead of rewarding us as we deserve He offers mercy, as He did to “a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an insolent man” who became the Apostle Paul (1 Tim. 1:13).

But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved) (Eph. 2:4-5)

Mercy is as much a part of God’s being as love and righteousness, and it has always been this way. Back in the Torah, Moses makes a prayer for Israel very similar to Daniel’s plea. The people have rebelled, and Moses is asking for God’s mercy to mingle with His righteousness.

And now, I pray, let the power of my Lord be great, just as You have spoken, saying, ‘The Lord is longsuffering and abundant in mercy, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He by no means clears the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation.’ Pardon the iniquity of this people, I pray, according to the greatness of Your mercy, just as You have forgiven this people, from Egypt even until now.” (Num. 14:17-19)

Moses is directly referencing God’s own description of Himself in Exodus 34:6-7. These are the character traits of “God is love” which back-up the covenant God makes with His people

In the Old Testament verses we’ve been quoting, “mercy” is translated from the Hebrew chesed (H2617). The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament points out that this word is often connected with covenant — most likely in that God’s covenant is a result of His chesed and includes the promise of His loving kindness. As those in covenant with God, we’re expected to show mercy as well.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. (Matt. 5:7)

In Greek, “mercy” is elos (G1656). It’s different from grace, which is a special kind of gift from God that consists of removing the penalty for sin. Mercy goes along with that and takes a step farther by alleviating the miserable consequences of sin (Zodhiates Key-Word Study Bible).

Jesus has compassion and mercy on us because He sympathizes with our weakness, having experienced what it’s like to be human even though He never sinned (Heb. 4:15-16). We, too, should exercise mercy towards others. As sinners ourselves, we’re in a unique position to respond to the suffering we see in others with loving kindness rather than condemnation. We must learn to follow God’s example of mingling righteousness and mercy. We never forget or ignore the covenant laws and our commitment to righteousness, but we also remember to always act out of mercy and love.

Grimm’s Laissez-faire Attitude Toward Sexual Coercion

15 February, 201614 February, 2016Marissa

Anyone else still watching NBC’s Grimm? I’m only one episode behind on the current season, but I’m seriously thinking of giving it up entirely. What was once an interesting foray into the dark origins of fairy tales has become a tangle of dysfunctional relationships and plot lines so ridiculous that Rosalee just spent a whole episode voicing my own frustrations with “how/why is this happening?”

More upsetting than the devolving story line, though, is how they writers have been handling the question of rape. Even if you’re not watching Grimm, this discussion matters because the way our entertainment presents issues like sexual violence both reflects and influences prevailing culture.

Love In The Time Of Cookies

It all started way back in season one with the character Adalind. She’s a Hexenbeist (basically a witch). She’s a main antagonist in this first season, and uses her powers to force Hank to see her as a romantic option. He’s basically roofied via magical chocolate chip cookie, but it wasn’t addressed in the show as rape and I doubt the writers even thought of it that way.

This brings us to the first disturbing idea that Grimm keeps coming back to, perpetuating the myth that adult men can’t be victims of rape. Hank wasn’t a victim — he was just a guy who accidentally had sex with someone he didn’t want to. No big deal (never mind that she drugged him and nearly killed him). We wouldn’t overlook this if the characters’ genders were reversed, so why the double-standard?

English and Welsh law didn’t recognize male rape as a crime until 1994. The United States was even farther behind — the FBI’s definition of rape didn’t include male victims until early 2012. I suppose it’s not surprising, then, that the statistics I could find related to male rape were UK-based. Crime reports for 2014 in England & Wales record 3,580 sexual assaults against men. Survivors UK (a male-only support group) estimates that only 2-3% of assaults are actually reported (compared to 10-12% for women). And yet society doesn’t treat it as a problem — Survivors UK had their funding cut completely last year, and most rape hotlines won’t even talk to men. No wonder Hank didn’t want to claim his coerced relationship with Adalind was rape.

It’s Okay If She’s A Witch

Adalind’s actions with Hank are played-off as unwanted sexual aggression rather than an attack, but apparently it’s enough to justify writing her comeuppance as an assault scene. Since the blood of a Grimm can strip a Hexenbeist of her powers, Nick attacks her, pins her to the ground, climbs on top of her, and kisses her so she’ll bite his lip. There’s really no way not to interpret this imagery as sexual. Charity has written an excellent article titled “A Grimm Look at Writers’ Impact on Rape Culture” that addresses this scene in-depth, as well as the after-math that continues comparing Adalind to a rape victim.

The disturbing part about this scene isn’t so much that it’s played as a sexual assault, but rather that no one has a problem with that. This perpetuates the myth that sexually aggressive women are asking for (or even deserve) sexual assault. Nick is the good guy, the hero, and that didn’t change for most viewers after he attacked Adalind. But other people’s bad actions shouldn’t justify “good” people committing unconscionable acts.

Baby Makes It Better

Skip ahead to the end of season three. Adalind has her Hexenbeist powers back, and she hatches a plan to take Nick’s powers away. Much like ingesting a Grimm’s blood can take away Hexenbeist powers, sleeping with a Hexenbeist takes away a Grimm’s abilities to detect Wessen. Adalind uses magic to disguise herself as Nick’s love interest, Juliette, and he sleeps with her. While Adalind doesn’t violently assault him, here’s no denying Nick was coerced into having sex with someone he would have turned down if given a choice. Doesn’t that make it rape?

Now in season 5, Nick is living with Adalind and the child she conceived as a result of her impersonating Juliette. Can you imagine this in reverse? No one asks a woman to move in with a man she wouldn’t have consented to have sex with just because the resulting child needs a father. If someone did write that situation, you can bet there’d be other characters in the show discouraging her from living with her rapist. In Nick and Adalind’s case, however, the farthest any character will go is describing it as “weird.” The writers don’t see their past relationship as rape (see first myth) and, if the number of Nick/Adalind shippers online is any indication, neither do most fans.

I was going to have a “myth” listed for each section, but it doesn’t really work here — no one actually thinks you should move-in with your rapist if there’s a child! It’s insane. And yet, I saw someone online arguing that Nick and Adalind’s relationship is a relatable and realistic portrayal of modern adults in a co-parenting situation after an unexpected pregnancy. I suppose this is what happens when you live in a culture that’s adopted an anything goes (except abstinence) attitude toward sex. The more taboos we tear down, the easier it is to skirt around the ones that remain.