January 29, 2009
Sweetness
Times were difficult during the Great Depression and my grandma told me her family always had two pots of pinto beans on the stove, one that was cooking and the other that was ready to eat. Grandma’s brother Hugh would eat a plate of beans for dinner then he’d smash up some more beans and pour sorghum on them for dessert. There are some portions of Scripture which are so overused in sermons that they start resembling those pots of beans. Blessed is the preacher, teacher or fellow believer who can add a touch of sweetness to the familiar.
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Gail;
-----I keep an egg shaped wooden object in my office as a conversational piece. It is about three inches in diameter and slightly more than four inches long, and has a half-inch hole drilled lengthwise through its center. Both ends are just a bit flat, and it will stand upright if not bumped too hard. Many years ago I brushed it well until the hard grain in the wood stood out, then I soaked it for weeks in linseed oil. I used it for a while as a candle holder before I realized its real value.
-----When I am asked what it is, I offer that it is a candle holder. Then I await the rather bewildered expression which usually follows. It is quite apparently unstable, standing on the small flat of its end, and it is obviously too dangerous for holding candles, especially being saturated with linseed oil. So I ask for a guess as to what they think it might be. Only once has anyone correctly guessed that it is a seine float. Detached from all the rest of the seine parts, the float-line and the other floats, the sinker-line and all its lead weights, the net between the two, and the tow lines, and being in a business office rather than at a large body of water where one might think of fish, its connection with a seine just is not readily apparent. All that is readily apparent is that the use for it I suggest - the candle holder - does not quite fit.
-----Scripture is too often treated like my seine float. We tend to pick a favorite that will perform some function we desire. We then brush it up to texture it well and soak it in our favorite solution until it is pretty attractive. Finally, we offer it to others as something it may very well not be.
-----Some of us, though, are a little more understanding of the contextual necessities within the Scriptures. We realize the Word is not a list of detachable statements. Yet too we bring out some meaning of a particular verse, such that if it were a seine, the meaning might interweave all the floats randomly into the netting itself, rather than properly spacing and attaching them to the float-line. Granted, all the components of the seine are there together at the lake, but it just couldn’t catch any fish, and it really wouldn’t be a seine.
-----To be a seine all the floats must be adequately spaced across the float-line, the sinkers across the sinker-line, the netting properly woven between the two, having appropriate tow lines in place. The Scripture works the same way. All its verses are components of an overall message having multitudes of underlying inferences. As long as an inference does not misplace a verse from its connection to the overall message, it may be valid. And those inferences that are certainly valid are the ones that serve the overall meaning of the Word more than the personal meaning of the reader.
-----So, when I hear a preacher taking a popular verse to the brush wheel then plunking it into a bucket of linseed oil, my eyes glaze over and I excuse myself to go off into nap-land.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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