Can you talk about the difference between Greek and Hebrew thinking in understanding the scripture?
Yeah, and for our conversation today, it’s actually going to be particularly important because the world of the Bible is a more Hebraic world, which is an eastern-rooted world. We’re a western Greek-rooted world. So we think in particular ways. We think in terms of definitions and systems and theology and we think in the abstract, and that’s how we engage the world and communication in general. But the world of the Bible is not making those same assumptions, which is critical to understanding. If I’m going to read a book and it’s making a list of assumptions I’m not familiar with, I would want to know that so that I could increase my familiarity with the assumptions it is making because those are the things that are going unsaid. So this eastern world is going to be far more driven by the concrete, by images. We would say God is “omnipotent,” but they would say God is a “fortress.” They’re both true, but one is very abstract and it’s very wordy and systematic and all those western things. For them, it’s a picture, it’s an image and it still communicates the same substance. So when you read your Bible and it’s just littered with all of these pictures and images, [before] I would read right over those things. When I went to the desert, when I went and spent time in the world of the Bible, I realized, “Oh, I don’t ever want to read over the word ‘shade’ again.” That word is going to leap off the page because they’re not just saying the word “shade” to get to a point, “shade” is the point. And so those are the kind of things that really helped as I began to study and teach the Bible.
On the first episode, you talk about the understanding of truth relative to the Greek understanding in Hebrew. Can you unpack that just a sec?
The one that I always remember is one of my favorite conversations, and that’s the idea of truth over time. For us, truth is very static, it’s fixed. Western concept of truth is that truth is absolute and I don’t want your listeners to panic. I’m not going to turn around and say truth is relative, but instead of static for the Hebraic mind, truth is dynamic. Truth has the ability to go places and to grow. We are limited by our ability to interact with and understand truth. But truth is as big as God is because God is truth. So truth has to be, as I understand, as my world changes, as my understanding grows, truth is dynamic and it’s always ahead of me. It’s always growing as I grow. And so it’s just a different way to interact with truth.
I get this picture of this unfolding box, this box that just keeps unfolding and just keeps unfolding and it just keeps unfolding, and it keeps going somewhere. It’s not moving, it’s not relative. It started in the same place, but it just kept unfolding and unfolding and getting bigger and going places fixed in the same location, but becoming more deep and more robust and more colorful and more dynamic the more that time unfolds.
And that’s what helped me as I’ve gone through your podcast in realizing that I’ve looked at scripture as just this static piece. And the truth is that the scriptures are living—they’re constantly revealing and that kind of thing.
We better hope so. So that’s how the Holy Spirit’s alive and I think the scripture talks about itself in those terms and it’s so powerful to understand it that way.
Alright, so walk us through Psalm 23, the desert imagery and the mindset of “just enough” that you could talk about.
It’s like the quintessential favorite psalm. I had to learn from my first trip over to Israel, learning from my own Jewish-trained teacher, immediately from the first line, that shepherd was a desert image. I didn’t even really associate that. In the Christmas story, it says shepherds are in the fields and that happens like two weeks out of the year right after Sukkot. You’ve freshly harvested your field, you bring the sheep in and they eat the stubble and fertilize your field at the same time, but that’s the only time they’re in the field for the rest of the year. They work themselves back out towards the desert because the shepherd is a desert. Sheep are wandering the mountains and hills of the Judean desert. It’s a desert image. And so the Lord is my shepherd. We in our American mind start thinking, “Oh, like American shepherds, American sheep like in a pasture with waist-high alfalfa and a beautiful rolling mountains and a creek in the background and trees, green trees” but the biblical image locates you immediately in this very rocky, mountainous, barren, dangerous location. To say “The Lord is my shepherd” they immediately understand that to be in a particular place. To say things like “I shall not want” when you’ve located yourself in the desert, nothing makes more sense than the idea of “I shall not want.” When you’re in the desert, all you have is “I need my needs to be met.” It’s a place of survival, which I think for our listeners, our audience today—single parents, that is where you’re at. “The Lord is my shepherd” is somebody in the desert and they’re associating with the sheep going, “I’m stuck. I’m in survival mode and I have a shepherd. I can’t be driven by my desires. I’ve got to trust the shepherd. The shepherd’s going to meet my needs. The shepherd’s going to get me food. The shepherd’s going to get me water when I need it. To say that he leads me in green pastures,” I remember for the first time when my teacher said, “Let me show you green pastures.” And it was just the right time of night and we looked back across this desert ravine and as the twilight sun is hitting the hillside, it has the slightest green hue. There’s nothing green on that hillside. It’s what it looks like. It’s this dry grass stubble. You look down, he says, “Look down at your feet” and so you look down, there’s a little stubble, there’s a couple stubbles of grass right over there, about 10 feet over here. There’s some more grass, about 10 feet over there. There is a little bit of grass and just these little stubs of grass and the way the sun hits it, it’ll look green. This is not waist-deep alfalfa. This is not the image that we think of in our American paintings that we hang in our Bible college libraries. The phrase that my teacher kept teaching me was “just enough.” Like green pastures in the desert—you can’t even see it, but it’s out there. Trust the shepherd. There’s just enough. There’s one bite full and then you have to keep your head down. If you follow the voice of the shepherd, he’s going to get you to your next bite full. Now, if you’ve got your head up and you’re worried and you’re trying to figure out where you’re going, you’re going to miss the next bite full that goes right by your face. So it’s going to be one bite followed by the next bite, and it’s always just enough. It’s not abundance. I’ll give you one more. “He leads me by still waters” and we picture a bubbling beautiful brook trickling down the hillside, fresh, clean spring water, but still water in the Hebraic image of the desert is like the puddle that’s formed at the bottom of the wadi leftover by the rain and the floods. We read this from our American western perspective and we see lush abundance; we see comfort. The people of the Bible that wrote that psalm, heard that psalm, sang that song, saw provision, they didn’t see abundance. They saw just enough. They saw a desert wasteland, they saw wilderness where God takes care of me, but I have to trust that God’s got my back.
In Psalm 23 specifically how when he goes into the writer, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death hall, I will fear no evil for you are with me.” It changes tenses. The first part of the psalm is talking in third person, but then when he gets to the valley of the shadow of death, it becomes personal and it becomes first person. Is there anything to that?
One of our teachers, Josh, does an episode … where he thinks the Psalm [is] being written from the perspective of the sheep; it goes from the sheep being taken care of to the sheep actually laying down its life as sacrifice, which you’d have to listen to the whole episode to hear that case, but he thinks there are two parts of that psalm. There’s a front half and a back half, and I have been intrigued by that concept. Who knows if we’re right or wrong. But I’ve loved to wrestle with, oh goodness, there is this. God takes care of me. He teaches me how to trust in him so that—Romans would say to offer yourselves as a living sacrifice so that I can lay my own life down on behalf of other people. I think we live in a world of survival and yet if you’re a solo parent, all you do is lay your life down all the time. I think you don’t appreciate it and give yourself your flowers enough.
Almost every desert image has what I get, but it also has what I give. That’s what the wilderness does to us and that’s what single parenting I believe, not being able to speak from experience, but the people that I know that I’m closest to, I would say that’s what I see in their lives as a single parent. They understand the wilderness, they understand how to receive, and they also live in a constant place of giving. And that’s how you make it, that’s how you live in the wilderness.
You quote Bruce Feiler [in the episode] and I stopped the car, pulled over, wrote it down. He says, “Because the place is demanding, it builds character. Because it’s destructive. It builds interdependence. Because it’s isolating, it builds community. And because it’s the desert, it builds nations.”
The wilderness is never a place that we want to go. We don’t put it on our itinerary of vacation destinations, and yet the wilderness is one of the places that God all throughout history leads his people, key characters that he wants to shape, whether it’s Moses or Elijah, David, Jesus, these key characters that you read about, all these characters end up being driven out into the wilderness in the desert where they’re tested, they’re shaped, they’re formed. And nothing is able to form us like the wilderness, like adversity. So we would never seek it out. I’ve even heard people say, “I wouldn’t pray this on my worst enemy,” and yet it’s … just a matter of life. One of my teacher’s rabbis said they were talking about wilderness and somebody asked the question, “So do you pray for deserts or do you pray for deliverance?” And the rabbi said, “Neither. You pray for obedience. Like, wilderness and desert will be a part of your journey. It will be a part of your life and it’s not where we’re meant to be forever. But it’s seasons that we go through and you just pray that it shapes you, it does build interdependence, it does build community, it does build character, and all these things are true. It’s so difficult. And yet those people that have been through the wilderness and done it well are the people we look up to because they have such great wisdom and character. I think of those passages from Paul about perseverance producing character, character producing hope; I heard a teacher once say, “I wonder if that’s not so much even hope inside … it’s hope for other people because they persevere, because we see the character in them. It’s not just hope in them that it produces, it’s hope for everybody else. It’s hope for our children. It’s hope for the people that watch us. It’s hope for our community because they see us persevering in the midst of those trials.
I was just talking at an event last night about how I was a single dad for eight and a half years, and had full custody of three girls. Just three months prior, I left my corporate job in the music business as a music executive, and the bottom dropped out and it was the hardest season but also the most important season of my life. [It] transformed me, which is exactly what you’re talking about. And you’re right, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, but I can’t imagine my life without it. It absolutely transformed me and everything about me.
It’s the weirdest paradox about experiencing tragedy because you wouldn’t wish it, and yet you would never want to give it up. If God showed up and said, “Hey, we can just erase that chapter,” I’d be like, “Not now. That is a part of me, that is a part of who I am and what I’ve gone through. And in the midst of it, as hard as it is, there are gems of moments that are some of my fondest memories of my life that happened during that season with my girls.”
I can remember being in the literal desert learning this, and we had been there for three or four days and I remember Ray, our teacher saying, “Tomorrow we leave the desert and we go to Shala.” And I remember it was just three or four days of academically learning about the desert, and I started weeping emotionally because I had met God in a unique way in that literal desert. Those are the things that shape us and there’s a value to the things we experience there. It means something to us.
So many of our single parents are currently in the desert, and most of them I would say, feel like there’s no relief in sight, much like the Israelites who were in the desert for 40 years. Talk to us about how they can be encouraged to find hope in these overwhelming seasons of instability and even doubt.
I think if anybody envied your position where you’re at, it’s how quickly accessible intimacy with God is in the desert. One of the images that I always talk about is shade. There’s a line in the Psalm that says, “God is the shade at your right hand,” and the Hebraic idea there is that God is always like He’s within reach and you learn that in the desert. He’s never closer. He’s never more intimately available than he is in the wilderness, and so you’re learning something about the character of God, which if that can be something you lean into, the problem … we’ve been trained to listen to our world, our culture, the internal voices … And so there’s almost like we give ourselves these daily grades, weekly grades, monthly seasonal grades of, “Well, how did I do in this season of parenting?” Well, it’s not as helpful of a voice as “Did we make it today? Did we survive? Did we hear the voice of God? Am I still following the shepherd? Am I still in his footsteps?” I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know where water is, so I can’t really truly grade this day, this season. I don’t know what God sees. All I can do is steward this moment to the best of my ability and look up and say, “Is a shepherd still there? And so that’s part of what I think I think about.”
That’s great. In these trying times. It can be easy to confuse having just enough, which is the positive aspect of it versus surviving, which is more of a negative thing. How do we move away from the surviving mindset? The truth is we may just be getting by, right? I mean, it’s like you were just saying, we don’t know where tomorrow’s supply is coming from, but how can we change our mindset from the surviving mindset to the just enough?
That’s another one of those paradoxes. On one hand, survival is a reality, and I don’t think we should ever have to feel guilty about that on some level. I remember Jonathan Martin wrote a book called Surviving a Shipwreck, and one of the chapters is essentially when you’ve survived a shipwreck, sometimes the next thing you have to do is just grab a piece of debris and rubble and hang on until you wake up on shore. You just have to. It’s not the whole journey, but it’s a part of the journey. When you find yourself in those spaces, it’s not an indication of failure. So that paradox of survival is real, and the flip side of what the psalmist is saying in Psalm 23, which is “I shall not want.” So there’s something about survival this season and the transformation, the shaping and the forming that happens in the wilderness that I learn, survival does something in me. It’s what we see in Jesus. Jesus quotes Deuteronomy 8, like, man, he’s in the wilderness and the enemy comes to him, “Turn all these stones into bread. You’re hungry, but man doesn’t live on bread alone.” There’s something about Jesus’s faithfulness and Jesus’ character shaped in those moments of the wilderness where he’s come to be. I also think of the apostle Paul: “I’ve learned to be content in all circumstances.” He says in times of plenty and in times of want, I think we could say when he’s in the wilderness and when he is in the promised land, like Paul said, I’ve had to learn, and both of those are challenges. It’s hard to be content when you’re not in survival mode. What the wilderness teaches us is how to be content with the fact that I’m in survival mode and to not just be scrambling and discontent. I think it’s that relationship between contentment and survival. Survival is our reality. And sometimes we struggle with that contentment, but how can I find that contentment in the midst of the fact that survival is real?
How do you balance the tension between trusting God’s plan and taking personal responsibility for building stability in our lives or for our kids?
Yeah, golly, and that’s hard. That’s really hard to discern in the moment, which is what makes that so difficult. I think that’s one of the hardest challenges; I don’t think I’ve ever mastered that. Maybe I’ve grown and my own character and spiritual maturity has probably grown along the way, but golly, what a challenge because there’s always this, “Okay, I’m just going to trust God,” but then you know that there’s this responsibility to steward my moment, to steward my resources, to steward what I am, and it’s that partnership. It’s that give and take. It’s reminding ourselves that there’s not one party. There’s two parties involved, so God’s doing his part and you have to trust that whatever he’s doing, as the shepherd he’s got those things. He knows where water is, he knows where the next shade tree is. He knows where the next stop along the way is. He knows when night is going to fall. He knows where we got to be. He knows where we’re going, but then there’s a flip side of, “I’ve got to trust and follow his voice.” I’ve got to do my part, so there’s a part, my part of that walking in the wilderness, and it’s harder to pull those things apart. Sometimes we’re so convinced that it’s me, it’s my decisions, it’s my stewardship that’s actually going to (fill in the blanks,) that’s going to (connect the dots). Sometimes I think some of us are like, “Oh, well, that’s on God,” and I just think that’s a constant tension point of what it means to live in relationship with God and to really believe that man doesn’t live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God, and still, I better go buy bread when I’m supposed to buy bread. You know what I mean? It’s that constant. Yeah, we live in that space. What I’m hearing is just being aware that there are two parts to everything, and so holding those two parts in tension—they’re probably meant to be in tension. I mean, it’s not, tension isn’t bad. We’re not trying to eliminate all tension, but just being aware that there are two parts like you said,
I think this is why the wilderness teaches these things so deeply, so well, so thoroughly and so clearly, because I’m not sure where else in life I get that intimate of a lesson on that tension because I mean, that’s where you really truly learn what the voice of God sounds like and how you respond to that. Otherwise, I don’t learn the voice of God when I’ve got more than enough, when I’m the captain of my ship, when I’m nailing it and killing it at my job and my work. It’s a whole different discipline, but the wilderness—that’s where I learned the voice of God. That’s where I know what it sounds like.
Speaking of that, I want you to unpack a little bit what it means to be people of the ears, not people of the eyes.
One of the things that stunned me when I went to the desert in 2008 for the first time was I pictured these Arabian night sandy dunes, sea for miles and horizon deserts, and it’s not the sandy desert of the movies that you might think of. It’s very rocky, there’s wadis, there’s canyons, there’s ravines. You can’t see 200 yards in front of you. Usually when you’re wandering through the Judean wilderness, there’s a rock wall in front of you. There’s a rock wall behind you. You have no idea if it turns to the right or turns to the left up ahead of you. You have no idea how far to the next. You just literally can’t see, and so part of what the desert teaches you is to just trust the voice of the shepherd that’s leading you. One of the things that my teacher did that I do with all my trips is we had a blind itinerary, so we had no idea: Did he pack a lunch somewhere? Are we going to be out here for eight hours? Are we going to be out here for two hours? We had no idea where we were going. We didn’t know what the day held and that for me, I’m a high control, high anxiety. I want to know what I’m signing up for. I want to know what lies ahead of me, and he broke that in me over that course of those two weeks. I never knew, and he would always just say, “Let’s see what God has around the next bend.” And I can tell you as somebody who leads that experience, now I know exactly what’s on the itinerary. I know exactly, and I’m doing it on purpose to my participants to shape them, to teach them something so that they, how much more if I’m doing that on a silly Israel trip, how much more would God do that in key moments of our own lives and our own seasons of I know exactly where we’re going. I know exactly what’s going to happen. I know exactly what we’re up to, but I need you to not know and trust me so that you can learn beautiful lessons, be shaped, become the person that I want you to be, and we know that as parents, we know that. We know that with our children. We understand these things.
Absolutely. What are some misconceptions that people have about what the desert season is supposed to accomplish?
Well, I think the first thing is we always assume that if I’m in a desert, something’s wrong.
If I’m in the desert, I must have done something to get here or God’s punishing me, or if things were good, I’d be in the promised land if I were walking the path appropriately. And one of the things we see throughout the story is Jesus baptized—first thing, spirit drives him out to the desert. Jesus hadn’t done anything wrong. The last thing he heard from God was, “This is my son whom I love. I take great delight. I’m so pleased in you” … out to the wilderness you go. So it was almost like because of his intimacy with God. God says in Jeremiah, I remember he calls it a honeymoon. I remember how you followed me through the desert like a bride. I think that’s Jeremiah chapter two. God looks back on our deserts with fondness
I remember when I got married to my wife. When I got married, we lived in a 39 foot camper trailer like an old RV, parked out behind the Bible college for a year and a half. And those are some pretty rough digs for a year and a half. But do you know how I remember that season? “Oh, those were the days.” Do you remember the small little silly oven we had and no room and my knees hit the other side of the bathroom stall, and it is just so crazy. So I think one of the things we get wrong when we think about wilderness is we think that there’s something, this isn’t where God wants us when it could be exactly where God wants us. It could be like Job could go into his wilderness simply because God was like, “Do you know how much I believe in this guy?” That’s the crazy part of that story. On the flip side, sometimes we start to assume that the desert is where God wants us to be. The desert is a shaping place. The desert is never the place that God calls us for the entirety of our story. The desert’s supposed to do something in us because God’s got something, he has a promised land, he has a story, he has a narrative with another chapter on the other side of it. And so sometimes I think we get stuck thinking, “Well, the desert is what God wants of me. He never wants me to be happy. He never wants me to have more than enough. He never wants to bless me, always wants to shape me,” and it’s appreciating the desert for what it is and not what it’s not.
Okay, so what practices have you found personally helpful in periods of instability?
I love this question, and I would just say just practice in general. Faithfulness, I’ve always been somebody whose mentors taught me a lot about spiritual formation; I have always been encouraged by my mentors from my days of adolescence to be a person of spiritual practice. When I was first trained, it was practices of prayer and practices of Bible study. And then as I grew and got older, I started to realize, “Oh, there are practices that I’m built for when it comes to memorizing scripture, engaging in the text.” So I’ve had a spiritual practice package, I think you could call it, that I’ve been doing for 16 years and it hasn’t changed one bit. It’s the same practice, the same 6, 7, 8 disciplines that I do every single morning. And not everybody is like this. For me doing that, when I think of my own wilderness seasons, I show up and I hit, it gives me something—I’m anchored to it. The wilderness is disorienting, and I don’t necessarily find life in those practices when I’m in a wilderness season, but I show up and I do it like this is what faithfulness looks like. I’m going to show up. I’m going to memorize my text. I’m going to sit here and I’m going to do my prayers for the day. I’m going to say my blessings. I’m going to sit and I’m going to listen for the voice of God in my life. I’m going to read and I’m going to study for 40 minutes because this is what I do every day. Because one of my favorite passages in another desert psalm, I believe Psalm 1 says, “Blessed as the man does not walk in the way of sinners or stand in the place of scoffers or sit in the seat of mocks, But his delight is on the law of the Lord. On it, he meditates day and night” and that concept of he just does this every single day, every single night, every single day there’s a routine to this. He will be like a tree. One of my favorite scholars was a biblical botanist, and he says, “That’s the acacia tree, which is a desert tree. That ,akes us a desert Psalm.” He says that tree will sit there in the desert. It’ll look dead. It can actually sit dormant for years, almost a decade. Then when the rains come in just the right way, it will spring to life and bear fruit. If he is right about that psalm, that image, then what that means is “I meditate on his law day and night because I will be like a tree planted by streams of water bearing its fruit in season. It doesn’t fail.”That’s not in season every spring. That’s after seasons of drought, after seasons of, “Well, it looks dead, that tree looks dead.” And I’ve seen decayed trees that have been green five years later and I love that image of what gives me life is to keep showing up. What practices I practice are just the same practices almost as almost as a practice of resistance. I’m just going to keep showing up and doing this. That’s what faithfulness does in my wilderness.
One of the things that Solo Parent that we focus on is not trying to fix single parents, just walking with them in it. Talk about “sitting shiva” a little bit because I love this idea. The most transformational thing that happens with Solo Parent are our groups where we just come together in community and listen to each other and there is so much value that comes from that. Talk to us a little bit about this idea of sitting with each other.
I wish I would’ve learned this lesson. Well, I’m not even sure I’ve completely learned it even today. I wish I would’ve started learning this lesson so much earlier in my life. As a pastor, I was trained in the western world. We’re always trained to have something to offer some answer, to give some resolution, to lead people to some healing that we’re going to, and the Jewish practice when people are in periods of grief right after somebody dies or something like that, is they have this practice called sitting Shiva, where for seven days you just come sit with the mourner. You are not allowed to talk. If they want you to talk, they can ask you to talk, but unless they talk to you and ask you to speak, you are not allowed to say anything. You just sit in their presence. You show up and give them the gift of your presence. You are just there. And I’ve always struggled in ministry with hospitals, with death and funerals because I don’t know what to do. And the practice of sitting Shiva is a practice filled with wisdom. It isn’t about what I say, it’s not about the answers that I have, and it’s not about what I can do, action items. It’s about me showing up and being present, which connects to your desert images because it’s not just Psalm 23. We talk about the trees and the rotem bush and the acacia and the tamaris, and I remember when I learned about the broom tree. It is one of the desert images, the rotem bush, and the image is a sagebrush. It’s not much shade, and yet it is the tree that Elijah lays under when he wants to die. It’s the tree that Hagar puts Ishmael under. It’s the tree that helps you survive in the wilderness. And then we’re called to be that kind of shade. And what struck me was that God wasn’t asking me to be an oak tree. He wasn’t asking me to provide all this shade and all of this resolution. He was asking me, “Can you just be a shadebrush? Can you just show up and be enough? Just enough shade.” And so I think when you’re talking about these groups and these parents, what you’re doing is you’re showing up for each other and you’re just being present and you don’t have to have all the answers. You’re not going to fix everybody’s problem and you’re not going to rescue everybody from the wilderness, but you are going to show up in their wilderness and be just enough of a presence. That’s exactly what they need to get onto the next stop along their way.
Talk to us a little bit about your book, Asking Better Questions of the Bible.
Yeah, the book is essentially the podcast in a chapter format. It’s basically what we do is we walk through the biblical library. Your Bible is a cohesive narrative, but it comes to us in the form of a library. If you’re going down to your local library, you’d have different sections. You’d have the fiction section, the nonfiction, young adults, you’d have poetry. You’d have the part where you can look at newspapers and knowing what section of the library you’re in helps you engage that section of the library. You wouldn’t pull poetry off the shelf and read it like history or read it like fiction. And so knowing how your Bible works as a library is helpful as well.
So this book essentially has a chapter on every section. There’s a chapter on Torah. There’s a chapter on wisdom, literature and history. There’s a chapter on prophecy gospels, Paul’s letters, apocalyptic literature, and essentially says, “When you’re standing in this part of your biblical library, ask these questions. This is what this part of the library is trying to do, it’s trying to accomplish.” So it’s just asking better questions of the Bible. And that’s that book. We’re currently working on book two, and that’s set to come out next year. We’re hoping to have three in the series altogether, but the next one’s going to essentially be, “When you ask better questions of the Bible, what does it teach us about what it means to be human?” I think we’re going to actually call that one the gospel of being human, and we’re going to try to apply that hermeneutic to what it means to understand who we are in the story. That’s great. And go from there. I love that. Thank you so much for spending time with us, Marty. It’s been an honor and I’m grateful for what you do.
And in closing, just let our listeners know how they can get in touch with you and where to find out more information.
Everything they need probably at best spot is martysolomon.com.
For those that do go and search the Bema podcast, talk to us very briefly about why it’s important to start from the very beginning, from episode zero, a negative one, or
Because whenever you start any story, it would be weird to not start at the beginning. And I think God starts his story where he wants to, and you’ve got this beautiful opening chapter about how God feels about his creation and he thinks it’s good, and it invites this creation to trust it and to Sabbath. And there’s this wonderful opening chapter that I think we kind of often skip theologically. We kind of get right into the Adam and Eve story and we start the story a chapter or two too late. And I think that’s a big mistake, and I think we ought to make sure we start the story where God chooses to start it.
Resources
Asking Better Questions of the Bible
