Trying the Non-Nerd Approach for Once

Here in InterVarsity-world, we teach our students, particularly our small group leaders, a very straight-forward, systematic way to study Scripture or to lead others in studying Scripture. It's a simple, three-step process: Observe, Interpret, Apply. It can be said in question format too. What is the writer saying? What does the writer mean? And what does it mean for us (individually and corporately)? All of the steps are vital. Without observing what's happening in a passage of Scripture, there's certainly no way you're going to be able to interpret it. Without interpreting what you see, drawing application from those more confusing verses is going to be interesting, to say the least. And without application, we become stale scholars incapable of being propelled into mission by the Holy Spirit's work in and through as we enter into the Scriptures.

For most of my Scripture-studying life, I have made the mistake of sitting in observation and interpretation. It doesn't say anything bad about me, necessarily. I really enjoy thinking deeply about things. I love theory. I love stepping into the shoes of a battered and bruised Paul, or a Jeremiah who is seen as an outcast by his own people, or an old and wise Solomon, and trying to theorize about what is meant by a particular verse. Going even deeper into the endless nerd black hole that is my brain, I was trained as a Greek major to focus in on one measly word and extract a world of meaning from the hundreds of years of linguistic transformation that particular word had gone through when some apostle used it in the first century. I deeply love theology, hermeneutics, exegesis. It's just so much fun!

But application is so significant. Particularly these days. People no longer care, generally speaking (and probably oversimplifying to a fault), about what is true. That's a 20th century question. What is far more compelling to the 21st century mind is not what is true, but what is relevant. So I may be able to spend hours unpacking the meaning of one word, but if I cannot understand myself its relevance for real life, then I definitely cannot invite someone else into my new discovery, no matter how profound or earth-shaking it may be.

But things have changed for me recently. A year of overwhelming grief, emotional outpouring, and soul-baring has totally shifted me. I've realized that, actually, I'm a pretty interesting case. Working through grief has demanded the incredibly daunting task of looking at myself, at my wounds and my pain, as well as at my passions and my loves. And it's fascinating. I'm a weird dude. Some of you maybe have known this for a while already. But I think I'm just realizing it. And so as I have been in Scripture in recent months, I've really had a hard time sticking to the intellectual stuff. Having discovered all these new things about myself, I want to plunge into the application. What does this stuff mean for me? What does it mean for the Church? What is its relevance to the world in which I/we live?

And you know, if this lasted for any duration much longer than a short while, it would be incredibly unhealthy. Noted. But my story has largely taken place outside of myself. By that I mean, I just don't know myself very well. There was a question on my InterVarsity staff application that asked me to rate how well I know myself. I remember knowing myself so poorly, that I'm pretty sure I gave myself the highest rating available. Just never have taken the time to get to know myself. My deeply thinking self has found, um, itself, to be so much less interesting than the things it could be learning about all the other cool stuff in the world. But neither is this approach to things all that healthy either. Ourselves are our lens, our perspective. Any hope to know God will inevitably be through the pain we have felt, or the struggles that we have had, and how God has responded to us in those places in our lives. The same is true corporately. It is through the lens of Israel's pains and struggles that Israel sought to know God. Ever read the Psalms? It is through the exiles, the slavery, the ups and the downs, the good kings (all, like, 2 of them) and the bad kings (the droves of them), the prophecies of judgment and the prophecies of deliverance, that Israel ever really knew God (to varying degrees of intimacy) in the Old Testament. And as we who believe that Jesus was the Messiah to whom all these things from Israel's history pointed, it is imperative to acknowledge that we have been grafted into that people and that name, Israel. And, here goes my word-studying nerd black hole mind again...

...Israel = he struggles or wrestles with God (a basic definition; just be glad Israel isn't a Greek word)

Our very identity as the people of God is to, just as Jacob did before he was renamed, look at the place God has brought us to, and in the moments that we are discontented, to struggle with God over it. And like Jacob, sometimes we leave the encounter with a limp. But that limp does the good work of reminding us that we have experienced the single greatest blessing this life has to offer - discovering the strength and wisdom of the Almighty, so that we can quit trying to act so strong and so wise. After all, acting all the time can just be exhausting.