Bible for Self-starters: Making Scripture a Life Skill

Bible for Self-starters

Making Scripture a Life Skill

Leon D. Engman

Bible for Self-starters

Making Scripture a Life Skill

Copyright ©

2018

Leon D. Engman. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-4891-5

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-4892-2

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-4893-9

Scripture quotations are from Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version (TLV), copyright

2015

by Baker. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Preface

Introduction

Book I: Era of the Law: The Story of Creation through the Wilderness Wandering

Chapter 1: Adam and Eve: God’s Initial Idea

Chapter 2: Noah: God’s First Do-over

Chapter 3: Abraham: God’s Life-giving Promise

Chapter 4: Jacob: Struggling with God and Everyone Else

Chapter 5: Joseph and Judah: Brothers Rewarded

Chapter 6: Moses: How to Be God’s People

Book II: Era of the Prophets: The Story of Entering the Land to the Babylonian Exile

Chapter 7: Joshua: Inheriting the Land

Chapter 8: Samuel: Priest-Judge-Prophet Anointing Kings

Chapter 9: David and Solomon: As Good as Kings get Until . . .

Chapter 10: Elijah: The Reappearing Prophet

Book III: Era of the Writings: The Story of the Exile, Return, and Hope

Chapter 11: Daniel: Ancient of Days, Son of Man, and a Calendar

Chapter 12: Ezra and Nehemiah: Rebuilding the Foundations

Book IV: Era of the New Covenant: The Story of Messiah and the Early Church

Chapter 13: John the Baptizer: Elijah Again

Chapter 14: Jesus: God-with-us Wins All

Chapter 15: Peter: Moving Beyond Failure as a Lifestyle

Chapter 16: Paul: Redirected Cannonball

Chapter 17: John: The Last Voice Until . . .

Conclusion: Getting Our Arms around the Word of God

Bibliography

For Greg, Barry, Clark, and Phil, the Tuesday morning crew

Preface

From There to Here: A Pathway

Stuttgart, Germany, Robinson Barracks, American Army base, 1962 , age 6 : Scuffling with a neighbor boy on the grass. Why is his mother screaming at me? My mother: She was in a concentration camp. After the war she married an American soldier. She is terrified at being back here.

If ever I had heard a bloodcurdling scream, I never had one directed at me. We were pals for the previous summer: playing shoot-em-up cowboys on the way to and from the movie matinee on Saturday, playing army—like our dads—with the other boys our age, shooting marbles to see who would take them all home.

Our mothers were friends. They were in Stuttgart one day having lunch at an outdoor table. His mother began cursing loudly at a person seated at another table. She recognized a guard from the camps who was now just another free citizen in Stuttgart.

The day of the scream came about in autumn when it was time to go back to school. We school children gathered in front of our building to leave for the first day. After being famous pals all summer, my friend would not talk with me because I was a year younger going into first grade instead of second, like him. Suddenly he could not be seen speaking with me.

In scrawny little American boys’ world this naturally came to be resolved with an everyday, unremarkable, wrestling contest. Miraculously I came out on top, sitting on his stomach, pinning his hands on the ground. Not well designed for fighting, I was no longer upset at the insult, but looking for a way out of this new dilemma. He is going berserk, and if I let go someone could get hurt, namely me.

Then, from his kitchen window, came the scream. It cut through everything. The whole world stopped and looked up to see what was so awful—two little American boys, resolving a soon-to-be-forgotten dispute. I never understood until decades later what she saw. His mother, horrified at being in Germany again, saw a light-haired boy sitting atop her dark-haired Jewish son. I would never have remembered it but for the scream.

Dachau concentration camp, 1963, age 7: Dad brings us to see this place. Who are Jewish people? Why would Germans do this to them? My child’s mind did not yet connect this place with the people in the Sunday school Bible stories at the base chapel. It was hard to connect it with anything in my understanding at that age. But I now had the faces and names of our neighbors to connect with; the seeds were planted. The memory and the questions took root.

Chicago, 1975: A short, angry man gesturing at me, Why are you Christians always killing us Jews? Christians kill Jewish people? A student at the Moody Bible Institute, I was with other students, meeting people in different neighborhoods to ask if they would like to hear about the gospel story from the Bible. Some of the seeds planted earlier were now vines beginning to wrap around previously unconnected stories in my mind. There was no simple jump from the Bible to me now. Things had been going on that no one in my life had been talking about. My Church History class said nothing about killing in Jesus’ name. This angry man was saying something new to me. Germans and the camps I thought I knew, but what did that have to do with Christians? Far too much, as it turns out.

By this time—1975—it was nine years after my first life-damaging trauma. My dad, who took us to see Dachau in 1963, came back to us from Vietnam in a casket three years later. A helicopter pilot in the 1st Cavalry Division, documented in the movie We Were Soldiers, he was killed near the end of his tour in May 1966. He was trying to save a young soldier who had been shot on a battle area landing strip. They died together.

Once over there, he realized there was high probability he would not come home alive, so he prepared for that. He had my mother send him a J. B. Phillips translation New Testament; the chaplain said he should get a Bible he could understand. After his death, that Bible came back to me in his duffle bag of possessions. It was like a note in a bottle from my father coming back across the Pacific Ocean. A Bible you can understand.

My ten-year-old mind was recircuiting, walling off areas, incorporating a new reality. Years later at Moody, it was all swirling around in my mind. I knew well how ugly the world of humans could be. I was not buying any prepackaged, too-convenient worldviews. Truth has to be true everywhere, not just in a safe bubble we create for ourselves.

Chicago, still 1975, reading Bible with Jewish followers of Jesus: The New Testament is as Jewish as the Old. This whole thing is Jewish. Why has it been made so not Jewish?

I was from the West Coast and most of the students were from the Midwest. I met a girl there from California; we became West Coast compatriots. Her father had been in the Vietnam War; later in the war he ran the airfield at Ankhe where my father had been based. She was a Jewish Studies major for much the same reason I was interested in it. Yes we believe, but we are not buying any version of reality that has little or no correspondence to the world in which we live. A reading of the Bible—especially the New Testament—with all Jewishness stripped away will not do.

Chicago, 1993: Brilliant minds tell me to approach this more simply. We read the text, and listen to it. We do not cut and paste it into what we want to say. The Bible is not a bag of individually wrapped candies to dip into. It is first and fundamentally a Jewish story. Why would God do it that way? We learn the whole story first, and then we begin to understand the law, wisdom, and theology that rise up from the story.

I married the girl in Chicago. Fifteen years, two children, many trips around the globe later we came back to Chicago in 1991 for me to study Bible at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. I began to get my arms around this book, but only in the midst of a second life-damaging trauma. Eight months of harsh, nauseating chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in the first year of study was a test of resolve. Any temptation to teach more than I know or less than I believe, blew away in Chicago’s bitter winter wind.

California, 1999: We have been so busy memorizing verses that we never have read the Bible. This is an amazing story!

Yes it is.

Pastoring in a mountain valley town of 365 people became an opportunity to let the book have its voice. Can anything good come from Nazareth? Yes, one disciple at a time, just like always. We read the whole story out in a three-year annual cycle for at least three cycles. We all heard and grew together.

Connecticut, 2017: I have been in church my whole life but I am not sure I am ready to lead at that level because I do not know the Bible well enough.

He is a professional and has raised a family. He probably knows this better than he thinks. Maybe I will write something down.

Engaging with the Bible is a lifelong process, whichever way the road turns.

Our Life Skills Will Help Us Read Scripture

We each have a set of life skills. They may not be at the level we want them to be at, but our life skills are the core of how we help our family thrive and how we make a living. Whether at home raising children, welding in a shop, or writing cyber-security code, we have life skills. They are also called core competencies. We know how to do things.

My hope is that each of us will take all the care, intentionality, drive, and attention-to-detail that we put into our main work in life, and apply it to engaging the Bible. Whatever else is on our list of core competencies, make sure reading the Bible is there as well.

We live in an amazing age. Virtually all of us can access several translations of the most important book in human history. But for some, reading is not enjoyable enough to be a habit. If so, make one exception: God’s word. The Bible alone is worth developing a reading habit. It actually is more than a book; it is a small library of sixty-six books written for us. Once we get started reading, there should be no worries that we are behind in this life project. If we start, we will always be ahead of where we were.

God Changes Us by Little Bits and an Occasional Leap

Learning and growing is about taking in more of God so that he might bring us to an occasional paradigm shift. That is a place where our basic frame of understanding¹ no longer accommodates all we know. In order to accommodate what we now know we must expand our worldview/framework. That means seeing everything differently.

The Bible is a big book written by ultimately one author—God—but the sixty-six books in it are written by different people in different times. That is the text God breathed out to us. Learning to navigate the whole book can be intimidating. We should get comfortable that with God there is always more to learn. Our attitude should be, This is amazing, I had no idea.

That this is a lifelong project is never an excuse to slack off or be lazy: Ah well, I have my whole life to figure this out. I will get to it later.

This learning and growing is not only cerebral. It changes our whole life: viewpoint, attitudes, and actions. If we are motivated to transition to more self-directed modes of learning, beyond fill-in-the-blank notebooks, then we will make God’s word a core competency. The present book will raise many questions to pursue and explore. It may raise more questions than it will answer.

Where are We?

This book assumes a worldview where miracles are possible, no matter what our understanding of how history and nature intersect. If we think there is nothing outside what we perceive with our physical senses, we struggle to respect the Bible as a message and gift from God. This book accepts the Bible’s message at face value. Understanding what it is saying is not always easy or simple. But if we let the first question be, what is this saying? rather than, how does this fit what I think I know? then we are on our way to understanding.

Many read without faith only to find faith. Many begin with a poorly grounded faith only to be troubled and depart the pathway the Bible leads us along. Ultimately this journey is about who we are as humans and where we connect with the God of the Bible. Our particular experiences and way of seeing the world will align more closely with certain stories and principles more than others in the ancient text. God will meet us there because we are seeking him.

God’s Uncomfortable Change Process

There are people who know the Bible well. Some think they do, but have, in reality, crammed an abridged version of it into a theological box they inherited from teachers or family. Many of us do that when we first start walking with Jesus. We feel compelled to explain everything. But, if we are listening to the Bible, somewhere along the way, God makes us unpack our theological box and live with the largeness of his word. Most of us, at some point, like the idea of the Bible better than the Bible itself, but we press forward knowing that we are in the trees and will eventually break out in the open.

At least once in my own journey, I experienced a paradigm shift so profound that I found a whole section of my personal library suddenly irrelevant and unnecessary; I was seeing reality quite differently. I was growing and the old garments no longer fit. This present writing reflects some of that change.

1. Our basic frame of understanding would include our understanding of science, philosophy, and