Turn Aside

When you read or hear a narrative account, whether it be a novel or a retelling of some historical event, do you create pictures in your brain of what you’re reading about? Do you visualize the places and people and events that are described? If you do, perhaps you’ve experienced the odd sensation that comes when you watch a movie based on a book you’ve read and find that it looks nothing like what you imagined. I loved the Mandie series when I was growing up, and I always had a distinct image in my head of the layout of Mandie Shaw’s home. Several years later when a movie came out, the film felt disorienting because the depiction of her home was nothing like the image I had built in my mind.

This can happen, too, when it comes to the Bible. We grow up hearing the accounts of historical events (frequently referred to as “Bible stories”) so often that we form our own mental play-by-play of what happened, what the setting looked like, etc. But sometimes when we read the actual biblical account we find that our mental constructions don’t match up with how Scripture describes what happened.

The account of the burning bush in Exodus 3 was one of those descriptions for me. It’s an event familiar to many. God speaks to Moses from a bush that’s burning but not being destroyed and tells him to go back to Egypt and bring out the Israelites from their bondage. In my mind, this is how things went down…

Moses is out in the wilderness with some animals, not another person in sight, and suddenly he hears someone call his name. He turns to look toward the sound and is astonished to see not a person but a bush that’s on fire. He watches it for a moment and sees that, despite the flames, it’s not being burnt up. He hears the voice again, and inches closer before being told to take off his sandals because he is on holy ground.  

Sound about right? I always thought so. But then one day as I was reading Exodus 3—really reading it and paying attention—I realized I had the details all wrong, and what a difference the details make! Notice that in my mental picture, Moses heard something before he saw something. I always imagined that God called out to Moses first, and then Moses went over to the bush. But look at what the Bible actually says:

“Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law, Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked, and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.’ When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ Then he said, ‘Do not come near; take your sandals off your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground’” (Exodus 3:1-5, ESV)

We, the audience, are told in verse 2 that the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses from a flaming bush, but Moses didn’t know that yet. He’s in the wilderness, notices something out of the ordinary, and the first thing he does is look. All he knows at this point is that a bush is on fire; he doesn’t know that God is there. So first Moses sees the bush. Then, since his curiosity is piqued, he decides to head over and check it out. Notice he says, “I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned” (v. 3, emphasis added). The bush isn’t directly in his path. He has to change his trajectory to take a look at it. And notice that he still hasn’t heard anything yet!

Now check out what happens next: “When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!” (v. 4, emphasis added) The Bible doesn’t say, “Then God called to him,” as if relaying a simple sequence of events. It specifically says that it was only after God saw Moses’ interest that He revealed Himself. God didn’t speak until Moses stopped what he was doing and came over to investigate. He was silent until Moses stepped toward the sign He had supplied.

Of course, we should always be careful not to take descriptive passages of Scripture and make them prescriptive (i.e. not take passages that are merely describing what happened in one situation and try to say that things should or will always happen that same way in every other situation), but I think it is instructive to notice the following sequence of events in this case: God acted, Moses responded, God revealed Himself.

There are other times in Scripture when God speaks first or in concurrence with acting, without His speaking being predicated by a human’s response (e.g. with Abram’s call in Genesis 12 or Saul’s experience on the Damascus road in Acts 9), but in this instance God waited until Moses showed interest before He communicated directly with him. The fact that God acted in this manner at least once should at least give us pause and cause us to think that perhaps He might do so again.

For instance, think of how God speaks to us through Scripture. What if the Bible is like the burning bush—the living and active Word of God that God has placed in our vicinity—and it takes our turning aside from our everyday busyness and taking the steps to investigate it before God reveals Himself to us? In other words, what if sometimes God only speaks to those who are paying attention? We know the Bible consists of the very words of God, but if we never study those words, much less read them, then we shouldn’t be surprised when we feel that God is silent.

Incidentally, my experience with Exodus 3 illustrates this point. I “knew” the account of the burning bush, but it wasn’t until I turned aside and investigated that I really saw what it said. It was only after paying attention that I was able to have an accurate understanding of what actually happened—an understanding that the Holy Spirit then used to prompt me to consider how important it is that I pay attention to what is going on around me and especially to what God has said in His Word if I expect to hear from Him. 

So as I remind myself, let me encourage you to take the time to turn aside. Be alert to what God might have to teach you if you’ll only take the time to look. Because you never know if maybe He’s waiting for you to take a step toward Him before He reveals Himself more fully to you. 

PC: Michele Ingram. Used with Permission.

Living a “Lord-willing” Life

“Where do you see yourself in five years?” “What’s your ten-year plan?” Questions like these have to be among the most annoying in the panoply of inquiries known to man. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the importance of having specified goals and working diligently towards them. But if my twenty-nine years of life have taught me anything, it’s that we cannot know for sure where we will be even one month from now, much less five years from now, so maybe we should stop pretending like we can.

When I was ten, my family moved twelve hours away from my childhood home with the intention of returning in three years. Eleven years later, we were still twelve hours away, and when we did move, it wasn’t back to where we had left.

When I was in high school, I intended to get my Master of Library Science right after college. Instead, I ended up going the archives route in grad school and got a job as an archives assistant. At that point, I intended to be done with school. Instead, when it became apparent any hope of moving from part-time temp work to full-time permanent work rested in my having a full 36-hr master’s degree instead of an 18-hr graduate certificate, I went back to school and got my MLS.

When I was a sophomore in college, I thought I would be married to my boyfriend in the next couple of years. Instead, we broke up a few months later, and seven years passed before I met my fiancé.

When I was twenty-seven, my fiancé and I got engaged and started planning our life overseas (in a part of the world I never in a million years would have thought I would ever live), and we intended our married life to begin seven months later. Instead, three months later the world shut down, and now in the eighteenth month of our engagement, we find ourselves still unsure of when or how we can get married.  

Did you catch a pattern there? Intentions do not always translate into reality. And these are just a few examples of how things in life have not played out the way I thought they would. But individually and collectively, they have impressed upon me the truth of God’s Word regarding our finite understanding and the omniscience of God.

I’m not sure if it’s an American phrase, a Southern phrase, or an Appalachian phrase, but I grew up hearing people say, “Lord-willing and the creek don’t rise” when they mentioned things they intended to do. In other words, “I’ll do such-and-such, if God wills it and if nothing comes up to prevent me from doing it.” The phrase is said so frequently and with such nonchalance that I never really considered the gravity of what it meant—until I saw how often the things I planned to do were different from what actually happened.

As plan after plan fell through or morphed into something different, certain verses in the Bible began to resonate in a deeper way:

“The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:19, ESV).

“Many are the plans in the mind of a man, but it is the purpose of the LORD that will stand” (Proverbs 19:21, ESV).

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9, ESV).

“Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.” (Matthew 6:34, ESV)

These verses remind us to hold our plans lightly and to rest in the sovereignty of God. But did you know that the very phrase “Lord-willing” is biblical in both substance and origin? Jesus’ half-brother James writes in James 4, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil’” (James 4:13-16, ESV, emphasis added).

It turns out, to say “Lord-willing” is more than just a flippant remark—or at least it should be. Because the hard-and-fast truth is that we do nothing—not even take a breath—without that action being allowed by the sovereign Creator and Sustainer of the universe and all that is in it. This should cause us to have great humility when it comes to our idea of what our lives will look like. It might not seem like a big deal to assert what we plan on doing, but James reminds us that to be so blindly certain about our future is nothing more than arrogance.

We know nothing, really, about the future, so as we think and dream and plan for what it might hold, let’s be ever mindful that our plans will only be fulfilled to the extent that God allows them to be, all within His perfect will. And whether we’re crafting five-year goals or plotting out tomorrow’s errand route, let’s suffix each plan with a sincere “Lord-willing” and live our lives in the humility that such a genuine acknowledgement entails.

PC: Pam Galagan. Used with permission.

Meant for Good

There’s a contemporary worship song by Michael W. Smith that includes the following lyric: “Even what the enemy means for evil, you turn it for our good. You turn it for our good and for your glory.” This is a commonly expressed sentiment in Christian circles, and it finds its origin in two passages of Scripture—the life of Joseph in Genesis and the letter of Paul to the Romans. The idea seems straightforward enough. Our spiritual enemy attacks us on every side, but God takes even his most diabolical schemes and works them to our ultimate benefit. Not only the attacks of the enemy, but “all things” are used to produce good for those of us, as Paul explains, “who love God” and “who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28, ESV).

The specific mention of evil intent comes from the Old Testament passage in Genesis. Joseph was sold into slavery as a young man by his jealous brothers. He ended up in Egypt where he became a respected servant before being thrown in jail after a false accusation of sexual assault. Once in jail, he also became respected among the prisoners and guards and eventually was released after God revealed to him interpretations of several dreams, one of which belonged to Pharaoh. In a dramatic turn of events, Joseph went straight from prison to being the #2 man in all of Egypt, tasked with overseeing the nation’s preparation during several bountiful years for the several years of famine that were about to come.

The famine was so widespread and severe that Joseph’s brothers journeyed from Canaan to Egypt to buy food, and eventually they discovered what had become of their younger brother. Joseph treated his brothers kindly, despite their sin against him, and moved his entire family to Egypt, including his aging father Jacob. Everything was well and good until Jacob died. Then Joseph’s brothers began to fear that Joseph would retaliate against them for selling him into slavery. And it is in Joseph’s response to his brothers that we see the idea of evil being turned into good.

“But Joseph said to them, “Do not fear, for am I in the place of God? As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:19-20a, ESV). In other words, God used the malicious intent of Joseph’s brothers to produce a series of blessings instead. He’s pretty cool like that. But did you know Joseph’s words don’t stop there? There is more to verse 20 that often gets overlooked.

“As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 50:20, ESV, emphasis added). Did you catch that? The good that Joseph was referring to was not the prosperity and reverence he enjoyed as second-in-command. It wasn’t his beautiful Egyptian wife or his two sons or his being able to be with his father in his final days. It was the saving of hundreds of thousands of people who otherwise would have perished from famine had Joseph not been in a position to provide food for them.

So often we think of God’s taking evil and turning it into good as if it has a very narrow application to our own lives. Even when we consider Joseph’s words in context, I think we tend to focus on the good that God brought about in Joseph’s life. In other words, we imagine him to have meant, “You intended to do me harm, but God meant it for good to raise me up and bless me with much prestige and possessions and power. See, you meant to sell me as a slave, but look at where I am now!” But that’s not what he says. In fact, he says nothing about his own position at all.

Instead, Joseph points to the good for many other people that his own misfortune ended up bringing about. Joseph’s journey wasn’t really that much about Joseph after all. It was about saving countless people from early death, including preservation of the line of Joseph’s brother Judah through which Jesus would come.

So what if we stopped looking so narrowly for the ways in which we think God will bless us individually through the hardships we face in life? Certainly, God does use trials to grow us in Christ-likeness, to bless us with the result of our becoming more reflective of His nature, and even sometimes to produce physical blessings as well. But what if sometimes our difficulties are meant first and foremost to be a conduit of blessing for others?    

What if God uses your loss of job to move you to a different place where you will lead someone to know Jesus? What if God uses a death in your family to bring about reconciliation between estranged relatives? What if God uses an illness to drive you deeper into His Word and prepare you to teach others? What if God uses my prolonged separation from my fiancé and our delayed marriage to encourage others to be faithful in seasons of waiting?

It’s easy to want to grasp at hope of personal blessings when we’re enduring trials, but isn’t it so much more amazing to realize that God can exponentially increase the blessings to be had from our difficult circumstances? That He can take what was meant for evil against us and turn it into good for us and for others?

I encourage you the next time you find yourself in the middle of an undesirable, frustrating, or downright excruciating situation to turn your gaze to Jesus and trust that He is able to bring beauty from ashes—even if it takes years for us to see it, as it did in Joseph’s case. See, the event of Joseph’s being sold into slavery was a single point in time that set in motion a purposeful course of events to achieve the salvation of hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of people over a decade later.

Think of that! We know Joseph was seventeen years old when he told his brothers about his dreams (Gen. 37:2) and was still referred to as a “boy” when sold into slavery (Gen. 37:30). And we know that “Joseph was thirty years old when he entered the service of Pharaoh king of Egypt” (Gen. 41:46a, ESV). That’s thirteen long years consisting first of servitude then imprisonment before finally seeing the good that God intended to work through it all.

Joseph’s testimony should give us great encouragement and remind us to hold fast during times of great trial. God’s sovereign purposes follow His timeline, not ours. And the good He brings about may come in unexpected ways and after decades of seeming delay. But God is powerful enough to bring good out of evil and to extend the reach of that good far and wide, using our own struggles not only to bear fruit in our lives but also to bless the lives of others, and that’s exactly what He does. Take comfort in that, my friend, and if you’re struggling to praise God in the midst of a trial, I encourage you to spend some time pondering the greatness and graciousness of a God that turns things meant for evil into things that are meant for good.

PC:  Yandle Multimedia Photography (yandlemm.com)

Used with permission.