Dive in

Corn ears were rustling outside my bedroom window this morning. Baby goats were searching for their mamas and a pickup rumbled down the dusty road to check his irrigation water.

I’m a Colorado farm girl. That means that on my morning walk, when I see a freshly-mown alfalfa field studded with trussed-up round bales of hay, I rejoice in God’s grace. Watching a newborn calf stumble on rubbery legs as it searches for its mama and its first meal reminds me of hungering after God’s Word.

What it means is that the agricultural metaphors in the Bible make sense to me. I’ve handled sheep and watched wheat harvested.

My friend is a city girl. Recently we read Jesus’ words about his yoke (Matt. 11:29) and she was stumped. What was a yoke? How could it be easy? The agricultural analogy didn’t work as well for her, but she understood instantly many implications from the Good Samaritan story. She knew about muggings and gang attacks. She probably understood the Samaritan’s fear better than I did.

An analogy draws a comparison, assuming that if some things are similar, others are as well. The Bible is packed with them.

When God calls himself our heavenly father, he is comparing himself with an early father. We understand something about the nature of a father – his leadership, his care, his creative potency – and can apply what we know to what we don’t understand: the divine. It’s a limited analogy, of course, for no father is perfect like God is, and some don’t display the very traits that are complete in God.

All analogies are limited; none are absolute. But God has hardwired into us the ability to understand words and analogies. He created us for communication with him and he uses words to help us understand what is cannot be know through our natural senses. How do we describe God apart from analogies? Our descriptions are comparisons.

Many of the analogies in the Bible are drawn for the specific audience. Jesus used agricultural comparisons when he spoke to farmers. He shifted to legal comparisons when he spoke to scribes. Paul used philosophical terminology with the thinkers in Athens and terms of power when confronting the magicians and shamans in Ephesus.

Our challenge today is not to be limited to our own comparisons. My friend may not know what a yoke is, but she can learn. I may not fully comprehend the tensions of the Jews and Samaritans in the first century, but I can learn.

Unpacking the Bible takes effort. But if we know that it is God’s method of expressing his nature, we will get to work. Let’s dive in!

(Note: I am hoping that this article is the first of a weekly series about digging deeper into the Word. Please leave a comment or e-mail me if this would be helpful. I hope to discuss many tools we can use in unpacking Scripture and your input is very valuable.)