Tapestry Discovery

Those Read-Through-the-Bible plans? I love the idea of them. I’ve just never been able to actually do them.

When I first tried, early in my Christian walk, I could not make connections between Old Testament narrative, a song David wrote a thousand years later, and a Jesus story set a thousand years after that. I figured, I’m not good at the wide net approach; my personality is better suited to digging deep in one focused spot.

And, for the most part, that’s what I did for the last 25 years: dug deep into God’s Word, one beautifully rich book at a time, growing in understanding of and love for Him along the way.

So don’t ask me where the idea came; it was out of left field (God’s direction can feel like that sometimes, right?). But when my kids settled into their school routines, and I contemplated what to study next, it came to me that I should read through the whole Bible. I prayed, found a plan on my Bible app, and asked God for the grace to stick with it – at least for a couple weeks, before returning to my native dig-deep approach.

Imagine my surprise when I began to discover patterns in these “random” readings, like varied threads coming together in a tapestry, patterns my newly redeemed eyes could not recognize all those years ago. By Day 2, these eyes welled with tears to recognize God’s repeated message to generation after generation, separated by thousands of years. (And I wrote the post below: The Foolishness of Independent Agency.)

Why should this emerging tapestry surprise me? God is Who He Is, and always has been. His Word for us is consistent and straightforward, albeit narrated and fleshed out in a broad variety of texture and color. Every day, every passage, every message reveals Jesus: the fulfillment of God’s promises, the salvation of God’s people.

The Foolishness of Independent Agency

Discovering the Tapestry, Day 2: Genesis 3  ~ Matthew 2 ~ Psalm 2:2-6 ~ Proverbs 1:7

The story is certainly familiar. God clearly told Adam not to eat from that One Tree; Eve was drawn to it, and Adam with her. With some coaxing by the serpent, they judged its fruit not by God’s eternal truth, but by their own limited sensibilities (it was good for food, pleasing to the eye and offered wisdom). Exiled from Paradise for their own protection, their actions have impacted the entirety of the human race, from beginning to end.

The story is certainly familiar. Astrologers from afar followed a Star that clearly marked the birth of a new King, unprecedented in glory. When he heard the report, Herod judged Jesus not by God’s truth as divined by the wise men, but by his own paranoid sensibilities. He does all in his earthly power to destroy this perceived rival to his throne (including slaughtering a city’s worth of baby boys, just in case). Yet, God’s voice whispered to the wise men and to Joseph through dreams, guiding them away from Herod’s murderous path.

In Psalm 2, God speaks raises His voice above a whisper, and speaks clearly about Herod and his ilk, those who imagine they could stand against the Lord. Basically, He laughs at them and declares, “Who do you think you are?”

The kings of the earth rise up and the rulers band together against the Lord 

and against his anointed, saying, “Let us break their chains and throw off their shackles.” The One enthroned in heaven laughs; the Lord scoffs at them. 

He rebukes them in his anger and terrifies them in his wrath, saying, 

“I have installed my king on Zion, my holy mountain.”

Independent agency is a foolish and dangerous fantasy. If God says the fruit is off-limits, then the fruit is off-limits. If He chooses to give His Son, a gift so unimaginably gracious that the world cannot understand it, no power on earth can alter His purpose.

And by Solomon’s hand, the threads of these passages are woven together: