Job 23:16 “God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me.”
When was the last time I admitted something like the verse above? When was the last time this was true for me?
Yesterday, our minister preached on II Samuel 12 and David’s sin with Bathsheba and Uriah. He made a passing comment about these events being the darkest chapter in David’s kingly career.
My mind immediately went to II Samuel 24 where David’s rash census-taking cost 70,000 people their lives. The passage is all the more problematic because in verse 1, we read, “Again the anger of the Lord burned against Israel, and he incited David against them, saying, ‘Go and take a census of Israel and Judah.’” A parallel passage, I Chronicles 21:1, on the other hand, says, “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel.”
Leaving aside the contradiction and assuming the harmonic interpretation, the entire story is faint-inducing and terrifying.
Today in class, I taught my students about lumping and splitting. Both are means of categorizing the world, of sorting the innumerable bits of data we confront into tidier categories. Lumping, however, only uses existing categories. There’s a reason for this kind of categorization, and life without lumping is, frankly, impossible. But it’s also a refuge from the storm of thought and too often leads us to compromise our characters and discipline in the name of “facts.”
In my effort to find a passage from the Bible each day that’s simple to apply, I tend to lump my verses into two categories: personally edifying or not. If it’s not, I don’t highlight or meditate on it. I move on.
As a result, I never really engage with the nitty, gritty details of God’s word, which is (according to Hebrews 4:12) capable of its own kind of splitting. It helps create categories that were not there before, exposes nuances to me that I had covered over, and invites me to occasionally faint and be terrified at the image of God that emerges from such nuances.
I want to find spaces where God can allow me to hear the truth, even the truth of Job and the passage in II Samuel. If these passages contain something I need to know about God, then I want to see them and have my lumped view of God split.
Lord, have mercy.