31 And the flax and the barley was smitten: for the barley was in the ear, and the flax was bolled.
32 But the wheat and the rie were not smitten: for they were not grown up.
Different crops grow at different seasons. The flax and the barley had already sprouted out of the earth and were developing their fruit, thus they were exposed to the elements and destroyed. But the wheat and the rye were still in the ground, which provided a sufficient barrier to keep the seeds alive and well. They would still be able to grow and be harvested.
What is the significance of this? Other scholars have pointed out that flax would have been used for the Egyptian manufacturing of linens, and the barley for the feeding of livestock and brewing of beer. In short, these crops were not essential for human life. The wheat and the rye, however, were a major food source, and necessary for survival. Thus, even in the midst of God’s curse, He had shown mercy. He had sent His hail at precisely the right time to hurt the Egyptian’s finances, but not their bellies. This is yet another example of God creating a wall between what was to be destroyed and what was to be preserved. It shows what careful control He has over the Earth and His power upon it.
God had shown terrific power to kill, but as of yet had not turned that power directly upon the Egyptians. He had destroyed their livestock, He had destroyed their crops, He had irritated and inconvenienced them, but the only loss of human life had been due to those who were so obstinate as to leave their servants in the field during the hailstorm. God was churning a menacing storm before the eyes of all the Egyptians. With every curse it grew nearer and nearer to lashing out against the lives of the people. How much longer could it be before God’s storm would fall upon Pharaoh’s people directly? Not much longer.
8 Then Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron, and said, Entreat the Lord, that he may take away the frogs from me, and from my people; and I will let the people go, that they may do sacrifice unto the Lord.
9 And Moses said unto Pharaoh, Glory over me: when shall I entreat for thee, and for thy servants, and for thy people, to destroy the frogs from thee and thy houses, that they may remain in the river only?
10 And he said, To morrow. And he said, Be it according to thy word: that thou mayest know that there is none like unto the Lord our God.
The priests of Pharaoh had also been able to summon frogs, just as they had turned water to blood and staffs into snakes. Somehow, they were able to do all of these things, but there was one thing that they apparently couldn’t do. They couldn’t undo what Moses and Aaron had already done. They could be just as destructive as the Lord—so far—but that really wasn’t what Pharaoh needed!
If the priests really had power over God they would have shown it by reverting His plagues. This was the difference between God and the priests. When God commanded a plague upon Egypt, only He could recall it. It seems that Pharaoh came to that same conclusion, and finally had to go to Moses for relief.
We often talk about the signs and wonders that took place in Egypt, but typically only mention the destructive side of them. Creation, restoration, and healing are far more difficult than destruction, though. More significant than God sending the frogs, the lice, the flies, the boils, and the locusts was when he miraculously cleansed Egypt of the frogs, the lice, the flies, the boils, and the locusts. This is the power that we truly ought to remember, the greater power that separated Him from any other, the power that proved to Pharaoh “that there is none like unto the Lord our God!”
Whenever we look at the root of our negative behaviors, we will most often find some form of stress lurking there. Powerful negative feelings fester inside of us and tend to come out sideways. But not all stress is the same. Some stress is inevitable and unchangeable, such as having a disability or a chronic disease, while other stress seems like it could be removed, whether by a change of environment or character. These changeable sources of stress are the subject for this series.
Two Kinds of Agitation)
Failing finances, becoming overweight, and having a messy house, these are all things that agitate us just by living with them, and then they agitate us again because we feel like we could resolve them if we just worked harder or smarter. Knowing that we could deal with these, but that we’re not, makes us feel guilty, ashamed, and weak. Our failure leads directly into our shame, and our shame leads directly into our negative behaviors.
I have certainly had my fair share of this sort of shameful stress. In fact, the three examples I just gave are all ones that are currently active in my own life. I have watched as the bank account became lower and lower, and the number on the scale became higher and higher, and the messes spread further and further. Each has brought its individual anxiety, and then each has been compounded with the embarrassment and shame of having ever letting things get into such a situation. Worst of all, I then indulge in unhealthy excesses to medicate this pain, and that excess further aggravates these very same problem areas.
The Fear of Destruction)
The key issue of these stresses is that they put in us the fear of our own destruction. Maybe there is still a little money in my bank account, but if it is trending negative, the eventual conclusion can only be financial ruin. And maybe I’m still able to get up and do what I want, but if my weight keeps trending upward the eventual conclusion can only be disease and a premature death. And maybe there are still some clean refuges in the house, but if the messes keep spreading the eventual conclusion can only be an entirely uninhabitable household. To see the train chugging towards a wreck and then discover that the brakes don’t work is enough to make anyone feel hopeless. They’re not ruined yet, but the crash is inevitable.
Under the shadow of inevitable ruin is a terrible place for one to take up residence. Is it any wonder we keep taking a vacation from here, even if only briefly, to the fantasy land of our indulgences? Of course, the fact that these indulgences only make the problem worse leads us to seek another vacation just as soon as we glimpse our home of harsh realities. We know that we’re not dealing with the problem, but it’s already gotten so heavy that it seems we couldn’t ever have the strength to lift all of it.
But let us take a step back to consider the facts that we have just uncovered. It is the recognition that our path leads to destruction that creates a constant sense of dread is un. It is the way a man’s life is trending that distresses him most, far more than the state he is actually in. So often we get caught up in trying to change our entire state, when really we ought to be focusing on simply changing our trend.
A man that is seventy pounds overweight longs to shed all of it, but his most pronounced anguish actually comes just from seeing that his weight is a mere 0.1 pounds higher today than it was yesterday. Being seventy pounds overweight is bad, but even more terrible is knowing that seventy pounds will look like a happy place compared to where he is going!
Shifting the Trend)
And in this realization we find our salvation! For which is the more manageable task, to get out of those seventy extra pounds, or to change the daily trend of 0.1 pounds plus to 0.1 pounds negative? Obviously shifting the trend down by 0.2 pounds per day is far more within reach than to suddenly melt away dozens and dozens of pounds!
And once again, I am saying all of this from my own experience. I am myself seventy pounds overweight, and 1,200 dollars in debt, and with six large messes spread throughout the house. And up until about a month ago I was inching further and further in the wrong direction in all of those areas and was miserable because of it. During this last month, though, I have started making small changes, so that I am now inching in the right direction in all of those areas. And at the end of that month, I am still overweight, and still in debt, and still have a messy house…but I am enormously happy! Why? Because the future is not inevitable destruction anymore, it is assured salvation! I have changed my trend and I am going the right way, and this is the peace I always wanted.
Charles Dickens probably summed it up best in his novel, David Copperfield (slightly paraphrased to a more familiar monetary format):
Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 19.96, result happiness. Annual income 20 pounds, annual expenditure 20.06, result misery.
At the start of this study, I talked about the lies we tell ourselves about why we cannot reveal the truth to others. Today let’s tear these falsehoods down and see how they keep us a prisoner.
First, let’s consider the idea that “I just need to really try my best and I’ll be able to beat this on my own.” I told myself this story for many years, until finally I had to accept that if I really could take care of my problem by myself, I would have done it by now.
I will always be able to point at my efforts and say that they weren’t good enough to make the desired change, but if I just try harder next time, then it will be enough. There will never be a time where I can’t make that argument, because the only way to prove it wrong is to make the perfect effort and still have it fail. But since I am not perfect, I will never make the perfect effort, so I will never have the empirical proof to discredit the theory.
But at some point, I just had to step back and see that I was running in a hamster wheel. Theories are only as good as the results that you get from them. And if this one has only resulted in me remaining in the same place with no change, then clearly it isn’t a good theory. I had to accept that this wasn’t a philosophy for improvement, it was a philosophy for remaining right in the same place. It was a pernicious sophistry that enabled me to continue my addiction and never get any actual results.
The Shining Knight)
The other reason I had for not telling the truth was the image I was trying to preserve. I felt that I couldn’t let down my wife and kids, my church and neighbors, my friends and coworkers. I knew that bringing forward the truth would send shockwaves through the lives of those that were closest to me, and it would break many of their hearts. I told myself that I didn’t have a right to put these good people through that pain. If I couldn’t save myself, at least I could endure my damnation quietly and let everyone else go unscathed.
Except that I couldn’t do even that! Not all addictions show their destructive effects so obviously, but all of them, without exception, damage lives and relationships. Some do it in sudden, decimating blows, others erode and disintegrate the soul over time, but all of them leave a life that is hollow and broken.
Through great effort I was able to hide the damage and convinced myself and others that we were all doing fine, and I maintained this image for a very, very long time. On the surface I appeared perfectly fine, with everything still held together, but I could not escape the sense of my soul caving in.
I knew that every relationship that appeared happy and fulfilled on the outside was, in fact, predicated upon a lie, and therefore hollow. My wife thought she loved me, my friends thought they respected me, but they didn’t know the genuine me so how could they really? They loved and respected a façade because I hadn’t even given them the chance to decide what they thought of the real me. So, there were no authentic relationships in my life. The ties I was afraid of severing weren’t really there to begin with. All the things I was afraid to lose I’d never even had in the first place.
My Story)
I kept my addiction a secret, and I rationalized doing so by telling myself that I would fix it by myself. I felt that I couldn’t break the “knight in shining armor” image that my family and friends had of me. My plan was to overcome my lust and pornography addiction on my own, and then, many years later, tell my family of my past with the reassurance that at this point in life I really was the person that they had always believed me to be. It was a plan as doomed to failure as it was dismissive of the feelings and autonomy of those around me.
When I was twenty-six, I realized that I had been addicted to lust in some form or another for twenty years, and I had been living a lie in my marriage for over five. At this point, I had to admit that I just wasn’t getting any better on my own. I had tried, I had really, really tried, but it simply was not working, and to continue saying that after twenty years of failure it was now about to start working was insanity.
Nor could I continue to believe that I was preserving relationships by living the lie. Things had been difficult for my wife and I for a while, and I knew the reasons why, but she was confused in the dark. She didn’t know why I was detached and unable to be fully present, she didn’t know why I was struggling to focus at work and had lost my job, she didn’t know why I was so absorbed with my selfish interests and constantly depressed. She didn’t know what the reason behind any of this was, but it was taking its toll on me and her and the relationship even so.
And so, on one particularly strained day, it finally occurred to me that I was destroying the marriage whether I told my wife the truth or not. I wasn’t saving anything by hiding the harmful things I had done; I was just dragging out the destruction in a more torturous manner.
Finally, I didn’t want to do this to my wife anymore, or to myself, or to the marriage. Finally, I accepted that even if telling the truth meant destroying everything in my life it would still be better than what was happening now. At that moment, the greatest kindness I could do to my loved ones would be to stop stringing them along and give them a chance to make what they still could out of the rest of their lives. It was the greatest kindness I could do for myself as well.
So, I confessed. I wrote a letter while my wife was away, admitting to what had been going on behind her back. I left it just inside the entrance of our home, and then I got in my car and drove as far away as I could. I knew I had to get far enough during this rare moment of commitment, so that I wouldn’t be able to turn around and get back to the house and hide the letter before she had already seen it.
And then, just like that, I wasn’t lying anymore. Just like that I was living in the truth. Perhaps it was an ugly truth, but it was the truth. And not one day since have I regretted that decision. The future was made uncertain, my relationships were made tenuous, but I never once questioned whether it was worth it.
As it turned out, after some rocky periods everything stabilized. My wife and I rekindled our marriage, I regained my children’s trust, I kept my new job, and I came back into the good graces of my church. But even if I hadn’t, I can truly and honestly say it would have been a small price to pay for the regaining of my soul.
23 The sun was risen upon the earth when Lot entered into Zoar.
24 Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven;
25 And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
Interestingly, the further we get from the beginning of the biblical record, the more rare these grandiose moments become. With Noah we hear about the entire earth being flooded, but with Moses it’s only the Red Sea being parted, and with Jesus it’s only walking over the Sea of Galilee.
Perhaps this is because the human population increased enough that it became simpler for God to topple one empire with another, rather than send fantastic powers out of heaven. Or perhaps it is because the further humanity exists from the Garden of Eden, the less God’s hand is directly shown. Or perhaps the miraculous judgments of God are actually just as prolific as ever, but we do not attribute His hand to them, calling a natural disaster or an epidemic “bad luck” instead of the hand of justice.
27 And Abraham answered and said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes:
28 Peradventure there shall lack five of the fifty righteous: wilt thou destroy all the city for lack of five? And he said, If I find there forty and five, I will not destroy it.
29 And he spake unto him yet again, and said, Peradventure there shall be forty found there. And he said, I will not do it for forty’s sake.
30 And he said unto him, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak: Peradventure there shall thirty be found there. And he said, I will not do it, if I find thirty there.
31 And he said, Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord: Peradventure there shall be twenty found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for twenty’s sake.
32 And he said, Oh let not the Lord be angry, and I will speak yet but this once: Peradventure ten shall be found there. And he said, I will not destroy it for ten’s sake.
Abraham beseeched the Lord to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if there were fifty righteous people therein, and God had assented. Now we have this sequence where Abraham repeatedly petitions the Lord, seeing if He is willing to spare it for fewer and fewer righteous souls.
It’s natural to see this as a sort of bartering between and Abraham and God, though they are not haggling at extremes and meeting in the middle, as with the typical markets. Instead Abraham is procedurally seeking out the very limits of God’s mercy.
And while Abraham is concerned for the righteous, it is not as if that same concerns is absent from God, Himself. Ultimately God will be even more merciful than Abraham’s final plea asked for. God will only find Lot and his family as being worthy, which is less than ten souls, but He will lead Lot and his family to safety before destroying the city.
Perhaps we sometimes feel the need to convince God to not just be good, but to be very good, like Abraham was doing. And I imagine that He’s rather amused at our concern in those moments, for He is always intending to be much more good than we could even ask for!
23 And Abraham drew near, and said, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked?
24 Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city: wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?
25 That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee: Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?
26 And the Lord said, If I find in Sodom fifty righteous within the city, then I will spare all the place for their sakes.
The Lord had just brought Abraham into His plans, informing Him that Sodom and Gomorrah would soon be destroyed, and Abraham took the opportunity to speak up for any righteous people that might live in that city. Perhaps Abraham’s thoughts were specifically with his nephew Lot, who had gone to dwell in that land.
I examined these same verses back in March, and what stood out to me was how Abraham’s chief concern was not that the guilty might escape their just punishment, but that the innocent might be unjustly condemned. His perspective is focused on the good in the world and trying to save it, rather than on destroying the evil.
Of course God knows better than Abraham the state of the city and what He will find there, but He still takes Abraham’s concern seriously. In this way He shows care for His son’s heart. And even though the outcome will still be the same, He is willing to do what He can to ease Abraham’s mind on the matter.
11 The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.
12 And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.
13 And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.
In these verses we get a little insight as to what was wrong with humanity at this point: they were filled with violence. Flesh had corrupted itself to the point of destroying itself! What a strange and horrifying phenomenon this is in humanity: that we reach the point of self destruction.
We do this on an individual basis, when we intentionally do the very things that we know will cause us harm, sometimes to the most extreme degree of taking our own life! We also destroy ourselves on a global basis, with the genocide of entire societies and the threat of mutually assured destruction.
These behaviors are the final and great insanity! What other form of life is there that intentionally destroys itself? In fact, as I’ve awoken to the state of my own soul, I’ve spent far less time praying to be saved from others, and far more praying to be saved from myself!
But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. Therefore now, O Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.
COMMENTARY
In my last post I considered the people of Nineveh, whom God had been preparing to destroy, but then He spared them when they ended up repenting of their sins and returned back to Him.
But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. And he said, Was not this my saying, when in my country? Therefore I fled: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil. And Jonah couldn’t stand it! This is the first point in the story where it is explained why Jonah initially ran from the city of Nineveh. The natural assumption would be that he was afraid of the people, nervous that they would murder him for pronouncing doom upon them. But it turns out this wasn’t his concern at all. What he was afraid of was that God would show the people mercy! Jonah wanted those people to die! He didn’t want to warn them about it and give them a chance to repent. He wanted them to stay wicked so that they would die.
Therefore now, O Lord, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live Jonah is a miserable being. Throughout the rest of the book God patiently tries to get through to him, but we never do find out what became of the man in the end. But my reason for bringing him up is because he is far from the only person to desire vengeance on the world. There are many who are excited to see our falling world burn. And I am not referring to people outside of religion, either. I have heard members of many churches who, like Jonah, were gleefully looking forward to the world getting what it deserved, intending to gloat over the suffering of the wicked. Such may be surprised when the fiery brimstone falls from heaven and it is centered on their own home!
Spiritual Wanderings 