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I wanted to share
briefly about how I changed my mind about how I read the Bible. After I
had been a preacher almost a dozen years, I began to change how I read
the Bible. In my earlier days, I read the Bible defensively, with a view
to having to defend it against modern thought. That meant that I tended
to dismiss statements that were at variance with the cosmogony and
cosmology of the mid to late twentieth century Western views of reality.
For example, the NIV translates the Hebrew ruach, spirit, as
“feelings” in the trial by ordeal laid out in Numbers 5, so we read
“feelings of jealousy” throughout the passage rather than “spirit of
jealousy.” Of course, ruach could mean feelings rather than the
more literal, spirit, and I found the approach of the NIV was helpful in
avoiding the statements that made me uncomfortable as a Modern Western
person. Glossing over some of the supernatural when reading the Bible
pretty much characterized me for my first decade or so as a preacher. I
was a bound by a hermeneutic driven by modern culture, but then I began
to immerse myself in the culture and view of reality of the authors of
Scripture and take the Bible at face value.
I began to read the Bible the way I would read Tolkien or the Dune
novels of Frank Herbert, not trying to get around the way its authors
viewed reality, but, in effect, reading the Bible for its story,
sometimes suspending what I believed so I could really hear the story in
one place without imposing a logical grid from outside. This approach
took place within a context of a series of experiences.
Beginning in late October 1977, I encountered some rather strange
things. Up to that time, I would describe myself pretty much a Reformed
deist who read the Bible through a somewhat Secularist lens. I tended to
view the Bible as a catalogue of extinct species in a museum of natural
history rather than as a divinely inspired field guide to teach me about
the world that now exists and how I am to deal with it.
The first event came as I was studying for a sermon. I was reading a
commentary and came across a comment about the importance and
effectiveness of prayer when the thought arose, “I don’t believe that.”
It startled me because I began to realize that what the commentator had
written was derived strictly from the biblical text, and I was saying,
in effect, that I didn’t really believe the Bible. That troubled me for
some time, and I began to pray about it. My approach to prayer up to
that time had largely been that prayer is limited to changing our
attitudes not our circumstances, to giving us grace to cope with
terrible problems rather than eventually rescuing us out of them.
Shortly after that realization, an older woman in my congregation sought
counseling from me regarding her obsessive ideation of suicide; she had
attempted to take her own life some years before and had been
hospitalized for it. At some point in our conversation, I asked her when
she first began thinking about taking her own life. I’ll never forget
her answer: “It was right after my brother’s death. He had taken his own
life, and I was at the funeral home standing beside his coffin. I laid
my hand on his chest and kept thinking about how much I missed him. I
said, ‘If only I could take something of him away with me.’ Shortly
after that I became obsessed with suicidal thoughts.”
In trying to minister the love of Christ to this woman, I encountered
behavior that caused me to realize that I was out of my league, and so I
sought outside help. Eventually, one of our elders, her grown son and I
took her to a Calvinistic Baptist minister who had had experience in
dealing with such matters. I had met him less than a year before when a
friend of mine from college and seminary days had come to Louisiana. My
friend published literature and was calling on this pastor. When he told
me what the pastor believed, I had been full of mockery, but now I was
desperate enough that I wanted help from somebody who knew more about
these things than I did. That night I witnessed things that I had never
seen or heard before, but the woman got relief, relief that lasted until
the day that she went to be with the Lord Jesus a couple of decades
later.
Around that time one of my elders shared with me that it is sometimes
necessary to command tempting thoughts to get out of our minds,
affirming the authority that the Lord Jesus Christ has given to every
believer. I had never heard of such an idea before, but I filed it away
for further reflection. Some months after that, I experienced a powerful
attack of lust.
I was ministering in my office to a very loose woman. My secretary was
in the next room, but the door to my office was shut. I experienced
thoughts such as, “You can (expletive deleted) her on the floor.” I
tried to pray, but I couldn’t. My mind was held captive in a steel trap,
and I had no will power to resist the raging thoughts that were filling
my conscious mind. Then I experienced the thought, “Get out of here!” I
did, and I thank God. I believe that I would have committed adultery had
I stayed in that room. Once I got out of the room, I did something I had
never done before: I took authority over those wicked, adulterous
thoughts in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, claiming the liberty and
cleansing of his precious blood. I commanded them to get out of my mind.
The deliverance was instant: I felt as if I had gone from a steam room
into an icy, mountain pool. Instantly the fog of confusion was gone. I
prayed for protection, went back into my office and had no more trouble
with such thoughts the rest of the time.
From time to time after that, I would encounter people with problems
that seemed to defy a completely naturalistic explanation. One of the
most striking of these involved a young woman who was struggling with
lesbianism. I had counseled her without a lot of success. Then months
later during a counseling session, she could not speak. After praying
for her, I ended the session, and she left. However, within a few
minutes she returned, grabbed my desktop fountain pen and scrawled H E L
P. She pressed the pen so hard that she bent the point back and
destroyed the pen. Not knowing what to do, I left her in my office and
went into the sanctuary to pray for wisdom. I thought about taking her
to a local, private mental hospital where she could be treated for her
hysterical behavior. But as I prayed, several people’s names came to
mind, and I decided to call them. Within less than an hour, everyone
arrived: two elders were involved and a married couple who were friends
with the woman.
As soon as we began to pray in earnest for her, she began to growl at us
and foam at the mouth. Then she spoke in a low guttural voice, “I’ll
kill you.” But we continued to pray and read Scripture out loud. Then
the woman threw herself on the floor and began to bang her head very,
very hard. My office had only a thin, unpadded commercial carpet over
concrete, and I was worried that she was going to injure herself
seriously, so I pinned her to the floor, pressing her head down so that
she couldn’t bang it anymore, and it took everybody to restrain her.
After a time she ceased to struggle, and we released her. We continued
to pray over her for several hours and finally there came a
break-through.
When she came out of this state, she was in her right mind and able to
talk. As we continued to talk and pray with her, her story unfolded.
When she was in early adolescence, her father, a professing Christian
and a leader in another denomination, had raped her, and she had endured
the fear that she was pregnant by him. She wasn’t, but she vividly
remembered standing naked in front of a mirror pounding on her abdomen,
trying to kill the baby that she thought was there. (I was able later to
corroborate her story.)
When we finished that evening, she was a different person. She got
immediate relief and was never troubled by such things again. Gone, too,
was the pull to lesbianism. In time she married and became very involved
in our church. She is still living a godly life today, decades later.
These incidents are not the only times that I have encountered
situations that I believe were more than simply the natural struggle
with a person’s sinful nature. What does one do with such things? They
don’t absolutely match everything recorded in the gospels. These people
weren’t running around naked in graveyards, slashing themselves with
rocks, breaking their chains and wailing at passers-by (Matthew
8:28--34; Mark 5:1-13; Luke 8:26-33). Without going all the way into the
modern nonsense that sometimes characterizes things done by some people
involved in Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, we must beware of an
anti-supernatural bias that leaves our people defenseless against the
modern day onslaughts of the hosts of hell: Reformed deism.
I submit that people’s struggles in life cannot be reduced to simplistic
formulae. That’s why some Charismatics and Pentecostals are wrong: most
things are never simply demonic. But the opposite approach is just as
shortsighted and ineffective in bringing relief to sufferers because our
world cannot be as easily divided as Immanuel Kant would have it. We
live in a world that is far more complex than we can imagine, where the
natural and supernatural are sometimes indistinguishable. Indeed, as I
have studied Scripture, I have concluded that there are three true
paradigms for understanding reality: the natural world, the world of
cosmic conflict between the forces of God and the dark powers, and the
world governed by God’s eternal, immutable degree. All three are true
and valid, and neither cancels out or minimizes the other. As with the
deity and humanity of Christ and so many other truths, the Bible is a
both-and, rather than an either-or book.
(My undergrad degree was in philosophy and religion from Presbyterian
College in Clinton, SC, a school whose faculty in the Department of
Religion bounced somewhere around Paul Tillich back then, though there
was a professor nearing retirement who leaned toward Barth. Anyhow, one
of the courses that I found of particular interest was the Philosophy of
Science because it left me with a sense of skepticism
about any attempt to establish a firm philosophical system by reason,
even the existence of God. But I eventually concluded that in the final
analysis, people believe what they want to believe. It is a matter of
the human will, not the intellect, nor even the emotions.)
Somewhere along the way, I changed my mind about how the universe works,
and I began actually to pray with expectation that God would intervene
in my circumstances.
Over these years, I have seen God physically heal people, sometimes
literally in seconds: one evening after our mid-week service, a woman
who had been diagnosed with degenerated disks and was awaiting surgery
as the only solution, was instantly healed as a group of elders laid
hands on her. That was three decades ago, and she is still healthy and
free from pain today.
Another time, God healed a woman of chronic, debilitating neck pain that
she had in spite of several unsuccessful surgeries. A member of our
congregation brought her for prayer. As we prayed for her, I was
impressed that God wanted to say something to her—I had never seen her
before—and I spoke: “I do not know whether or not God is going to heal
your neck. But you have great bitterness in your heart. In a moment the
power of the Holy Spirit is going to come in this room, and God is going
to give you the ability to forgive the person who has hurt you so
deeply.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, the woman began to
weep and wail. As she wept so convulsively, tears and mucous ran down
her face and dripped on the floor. When she stopped crying, she looked
up and said, “My neck doesn’t hurt!” She was healed—literally, actually,
permanently. She also forgave her mother. What I did not know when I
spoke those words to her was that her mother had forced her into a
terrible, traumatic situation and had left her wounded for years. But
now she was released in a moment of time in front of her friend and one
of our elders. This woman, too, is still healthy today.
People have been diagnosed with cancer and gone back for more tests only
to discover that there was no tumor. Of course, I still perform funerals
and visit people in the hospital, too. However, I have seen the effects
of God causing people to conceive after all human efforts had been
exhausted: on one occasion, nine months after our elders anointed the
couple with oil. Most did not give birth nine months later; sometimes it
was a year later. But we have almost a dozen such pregnancies in our
congregation.
Time and time again, I have prayed for money, and God has sent it to me.
A couple of decades ago, my transmission went out in our only vehicle;
it was going to cost $900, and I simply did not have the money. I told
no one about it but cried out to God on my knees. Several days later, I
found an envelope that had been pushed under my door. Inside were nine,
one hundred dollar bills. I certainly praised the Lord, but I didn’t
understand just how special this gift was at the time. When I received
the anonymous gift, I had assumed that someone had learned about my
transmission from the mechanic and had chosen to bless me in this way.
However, some years later a young man came to see me. He was a Southern
Baptist from another parish (county) and hardly knew me. He asked me,
“Several years ago did you find an envelope with nine, one hundred
dollar bills in it?”
“Yes,” I replied. Then he told me that he had been praying, and the Lord
had told him to go to Alexandria and give this amount of money to me
anonymously. Needless to say, I was stunned at such an example of God’s
kindness in one of his providentia extraordinaria.
On September 15, 1996, as I put a check in the morning offering for
$110, God quickened me with what had happened to Isaac in Genesis 26:12.
By faith—I had never been able to do this before, nor have I ever had
the liberty to pray this way since—I prayed for a hundredfold
blessing—we were really hurting financially at the time. I continued to
press this home to my heavenly Father in prayer for weeks on end, and
then, on November 16, 1996, out of the blue, I received 200 shares of
Wachovia Bank stock as a gift out of
the blue. I got on the
Internet and discovered that the stock had closed at $55.00 per share.
Do the math: it comes out to the penny.
Through God hearing our prayers, instead of living in a church owned
parsonage, we now have a beautiful home of our own, on top of a hill
overlooking a lake, and have been able to give away many thousands of
dollars.
I could go on and on with such examples of how God has answered our
prayers. The thing that under girded our children’s faith as they left
home to study wasn’t the theology that they had learned, nor the
compelling Christian apologetics—though we did strive to teach them what
we believed and why we believed it—it was that they had grown up in a
home where they had seen their father and mother regularly getting
themselves into terrible difficulties, been present when their parents
cast themselves on God’s mercy and pleaded his promises by grace alone,
through faith alone, and then seen God’s often dramatic answers to
prayer.
I learned a long time ago that my efforts to “fix” things usually made
them worse, but God changes things when we pray—things really do happen
when people who take God’s promises at face value pray.
Along the way, as I read the Bible the way I would read Tolkien, I
adopted, in effect, its universe, something I would never do with
Tolkien or Herbert—they are fallen, finite and fallible humans. God’s
Word is, well, God’s Word, and without error in all it affirms. But my
Weltanschauung changed in the late seventies, radically so.
Now, the universe is no longer cold and rational. It is hot with good
and evil. That’s how I read the Bible, and I now live in a “magical”
place, a place where prayer is the most important thing I ever do—the
most important thing you will ever do, too.
Cordially
in Christ,
Bob
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