Getting Closer to God: Listening

The scriptures referred to are Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7, Romans 5:12-19, and Matthew 4:1-11.

Profound hearing loss runs in my family and so, of course, I was tested a lot as a kid. My hearing was always fine. So the joke around my house was, “Chris can hear; he just doesn't listen.” (To which my wife says, "Amen!") And that's one of the most frustrating things about relationships: when people don't listen. Folks miss things; they get things wrong; they give the impression that they just don't care about the other people in the relationship. A man on NPR said that the worst thing about his father's marijuana habit was that, while he was physically there, he wasn't really present. Sure, a harder drug that would have physically incapacitated or killed him would be worse. But this man and his siblings felt their father was in his own world and didn't listen to or even take notice of the rest of them.

Listening is a key component of good communication. And I don't mean merely waiting for the other person to take a breath so you can talk. Nor does it mean just noting the words and saying “uh-huh” at various intervals. It means actually taking in everything about the person's communication: not just the words but the tone, the emphasis, and the context.

Tone matters because using the very same words, a man telling a woman, in a romantic way, “I will always find you,” comes across quite differently if said in a menacing way, “I will always find you!” I was once in a mystery play where I as the detective was romantically involved with the chief suspect by the final curtain. Neither I nor my leading lady could figure out how we got together seeing as I was interrogating her intensely throughout the rest of the play. When we realized it made more sense if the detective and the governess were attracted to each other at the opening curtain, it changed everything. Instead of trying to put her away, it sounded like I was trying to find a reason to eliminate her as a suspect. Literally the whole play came together with that change of tone.

Emphasis is important. Again listen to this sentence when I change the position of one word. “Only she said she loved him.” “She only said she loved him.” “She said only she loved him.” “She said she only loved him.” “She said she loved only him.” The meaning shifts with the placement of one word.

Context is important. When your beloved says, “I could just eat you up,” it comes across quite differently than if Jeffrey Dahmer said it!

This Lent we are looking at getting closer to God. Just like getting to know anyone, a key part of it is listening to him. While some people apparently have the gift of hearing God speak to them as I am speaking to you, the vast majority of us don't. For me, it is, as someone said, more like the Holy Spirit tapping me on the shoulder and pointing something out. I hear God mostly through his Word.

Of course, almost every Christian says God speaks to them through his Word, but some seem a bit tone deaf. Or they miss his emphasis. Or they don't pay attention to the context in which he is speaking. If we want to get to know God, we need to learn to listen to him properly.

Tone is important. God is loving but he is just. Any parent with more than one kid knows you have to state the rules and enforce them fairly. You don't let one kid bully another. And when they do, you get upset with that kid. Not because you hate them but precisely because you love them and want them to be better than that. Sometimes the kids with the cool parents, who let them do whatever they want, wish their folks would lay down the law and ground them occasionally. Because they don't feel loved; they feel neglected. They feel their parents don't care what they do because they don't care about them.

When God is scolding the Israelites or Jesus is talking sternly to his disciples, it is said in love. Again, you want the best for those you love and you want them to be the best person they can be. God's rules are designed to spare us from inflicting unnecessary pain upon others and upon ourselves. I picture God being more sorrowful and disappointed when he is telling the Israelites what they are doing wrong.

And notice that God usually gives negative commandments. Those give more freedom than positive commandments. They don't require you to do something, just to refrain from doing something. It's like your mom telling you not to play in the street. She's not saying you can't play at all—just not there. Because the risk of harm is greater. So when God says, “You shall not steal,” he is not saying you can't have what you want; you just can't take it from someone by force or deception. You can always see if they will sell it. Or you can find out where they bought it and get one of your own. Or you can make your own if you are creative enough. In the same way when God says, “You shall not commit adultery,” he is not saying, “don't have sex” or “don't enjoy it.” He's just saying, “don't mess up your relationship or another person's by stealing their mate.” Play in your own yard and then you can have all the fun you like.

Emphasis is important. A lot of people concentrate on things that are mentioned infrequently in the Bible or not at all. Jesus accused his critics of doing that. “You give a tenth of your spices—mint, dill, and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters of the law—justice, mercy and faithfulness.” (Matthew 23:23) It would be as if the county sheriff was so focused on the traffic laws that people were getting away with murder. In his parable about the Last Judgment, Jesus emphasizes how important it is to feed the hungry, give the thirsty water, clothe the threadbare, take care of the sick, visit the imprisoned and welcome the foreigner. Because they are his siblings and what we do to them we do to him. The Bible mentions our duty to the poor and disadvantaged more than 800 times, far outweighing the mere 7 passages about homosexuality. Yet which do we hear more about from certain prominent Christian leaders? How is it people miss Jesus' and God's emphasis?

Context is another thing to take into account when listening to God's Word. When Paul says, “If a man will not work, he shall not eat,” (2 Thessalonians 3:10) he is not endorsing Social Darwinism. The context is that some people were so obsessed with the second coming that they had quit their jobs and were just waiting for Jesus to return. And they were scrounging off other church members. There was a similar movement 200 years ago in America. Followers of William Miller believed his prophesy that Jesus would return on October 22, 1844. Some people quit their jobs, sold their homes and possessions and went up onto mountaintops waiting to be raptured. What followed is what historians call the Great Disappointment. In 1^st century Thessalonica some church members did the same thing, though neither Paul nor any of the apostles had set any date for Christ's coming. So Paul is talking about that specific situation. He is not saying anything either way about welfare, much less those who can't find work or who, through disability or the necessity of caring for small kids or family, can't work. As someone once said, “A text without a context is a pretext for a proof text.” In other words, you can use the Bible to prove anything if you take things out of context. As we see Jesus' adversary do in today's passage in Matthew.

There is a joke about this. A man is at a crossroads in his life and he decides to do whatever the Bible says. So he opens it at random and he reads Matthew 27:5: “Judas went out and hanged himself.” That's was disturbing so he closes the Bible, lets it fall open on its own and reads the first thing his eyes light on—Luke 10: 37: “Go and do likewise.” Now he's really upset. So he simply sticks his finger between the pages and reads what it points to—John 13:27: “What you are about to do, do quickly.”

That sounds absurd but some people do approach scripture like that. One Bible scholar called it Knight's Jump Exegesis. A knight in chess moves in an L shape, two spaces in any direction and then one move laterally, ending on a different colored square. And some people will take disparate verses wrenched from their contexts and end up with an interpretation that is novel to say the least, if not downright perverse.

This is often how cult leaders use scripture. They will take a verse that, say, is describing a situation, like the polygamy practiced by the patriarchs, and portray it as prescribing the practice. You may have noticed that not one of the polygamous marriages in the Bible is happy but that all are instead plagued with jealousy and rivalry. The cult leader will ignore the context as well as the intention of the passages he cites.

The model we should follow is that of the people of Berea. We are told, “Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” (Acts 17:11) A preacher who's done his homework and is speaking the truth has no problem being fact-checked.

Reading the Bible a lot gives you a good feeling for what is and is not in there, and what the tone, the emphasis and the context is in each book or passage. And if you need it, there are lots of study Bibles, Bible dictionaries, concordances, commentaries, and other books that can help you understand the Scriptures better. Many of them are online and free.

Before we leave our discussion of listening to God, let's pivot from the written Word of God to the living Word of God, Jesus. He gets that title from the first verse of John's gospel. I love the way J.B. Phillips translated it: “At the beginning God expressed himself. That personal expression, that word, was with God, and was God, and he existed with God from the beginning.” (John 1:1) Jesus is God's expression of who he is. So if we want to know what God is really like, we look at Jesus. And if we do that, we should be able to pick up on God's tone and his emphasis.

And we see that Jesus is not all sweetness. He does not turn a blind eye to hypocrisy and self-righteousness and cruelty and greed and deceit and violence and stupidity and lust and envy and slander and stupidity. (Cf. Mark 7:21-22) But he also does not turn away from sinners. In fact, he was accused of being too chummy with them and hanging out with the worst kind of people. (Matthew 11:19) He loved sinners but hated sin, the way you love your children despite the fact that you might hate some of the things they do. Think of the mothers of the boys who shot up Columbine High School. Jesus assured a man crucified for murder during an insurrection that he would be with him in paradise. (Mark 15:7; Luke 23:40-43)

Which brings us to something revealed very late in the Bible but which helps us understand the whole thing, rather like the vital clue at the end of a mystery. In 1 John 4:8 we are told that “God is love.” That explains everything. To illustrate I would like to cite the film Love Actually which I saw again recently. Everyone remembers it as being about romantic love, like the Prime Minister and his aide or the Englishman and the Portuguese maid or the little boy and his school crush. But it is also about the widower mourning his late wife, the woman who passes up romantic love to take care of her mentally ill brother, the man who avoids his best friend's new wife not because he hates her but because he loves her and doesn't want to ruin his friend's marriage, and the aging rock star who realizes the person closest to him is his frequently disapproving but ever loyal manager.

The Bible shows us God's love for all kinds of people under all kinds of circumstances. He loves the couple to whom he gives everything but who can't do one simple thing for him. He loves the immigrant who bargains persistently with him over whether a notoriously sinful city should be punished. He loves the conman who steals his brother's birthright and blessing and who wrestles with God. He loves the arrogant dreamer who is enslaved and imprisoned in a foreign land but who rises to be the second-in-command in Egypt. He loves the stutterer who doesn't want to lead his people. He loves the prostitute who hides Israelite spies though they intend to destroy her city. He loves the Moabite woman who follows her mother-in-law to a foreign land, renouncing her own people and gods. He loves her grandson, a shepherd who becomes a warrior and a king and an adulterer and murderer. He loves the righteous man who loses everything and demands to debate God over the injustice in the world. He loves the fisherman whose emotions rule his head at times, ricocheting from loyalty to denial and from courage to cowardice. He loves the Samaritan woman with a checkered love life who must go to the well in the heat of the day when those who would be scandalized by her wouldn't be there. He loves the religious zealot who is hunting down and persecuting his followers but whom he intends to turn into a missionary. He loves the runaway slave who must be returned to his master with a plea that he be forgiven for theft and released. He loves the world so much he will enter it and die for it and remake it, person by person, into the paradise it was always intended to be.

God is love and that must be the primary lens through which we see him and it must be that tone for which we listen in his words. What we hear as accusations are really pleas that we drop our pretenses of innocence and accept his forgiveness and return his love. What we hear as anger are really warnings from a loving parent wishing to save us from sorrow and pain. What we hear as proscriptions on certain behaviors are really prescriptions for living a healthier life and having healthier relationships. Often when we are in the wrong or feel bad we project those feelings onto God. We see him as spoiling our fun when he is really trying to head off any efforts that can damage ourselves or others. We can see him as shoving us in anger when he is really pushing us out of harm's way even if it means he will bear the brunt of it.

To get closer to God, we must listen to him. And we must be more perceptive when it comes to picking up on his tone, noting what he emphasizes above other things, and seeing everything in context. 

Of course we also want to talk to him. We'll discuss that next week.