The Forty Days: 1. Rain

During Lent - the 40 days of Lent - it is worth reflecting on the forty days in Biblical revelation.  Forty days is a long time, and 'LENT' derives from the same root as 'Length' in English.

It is likely that when anything happens for a long time it has added significance in the economy of God.  The first occurrence of 40 days in the Bible certainly has significance:

In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month – on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth for forty days and forty nights.

Genesis 7:11,12

The Great Flood is greatly underestimated in Christian thinking.  Although I have heard songs about the animals, and sermons about Noah I have never heard a sermon or seminar dealing with the blatant similarities between Noah's fall (Genesis chapter 9) and Adam's fall.  (If you've never considered this - read the two accounts and it will keep you thoughtful through the remainder of Lent - a more useful and Biblical exercise than pondering the fate of kangaroos or Antarctica at the time).

But back to the 40 days of rain.  Forty days seems often to be indicative of resetting, or preparation (as in the Temptations of Jesus in the wilderness - the foundational Lenten story).  Never, before or since, has God reset his created world as he did in those forty days.  Inundation undid almost all breathing created things.

Noah and his family and invited creatures were instantly saved when the Ark's door was slammed shut by God.  But while saving may be instant, resetting and preparation for the new never is.  

Plainly God would not need 40 days to reset humankind.  But he took them.  Sin takes some cleansing.

40 Days: it's raining

As Lent begins, it may be worth remembering that its 40 days are reminiscent of many more such time periods in the Bible.  Many think that 40 days and nights were an expression for 'a long time' but that cannot be proven one way or another.  It is clear that wherever it occurs in Scripture this period of time is of divine significance and not a counting coincidence.

In the UK we have just come through a very wet February.

Genesis 7 may or may not be set in February but (verse 12) the rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights.  Was it climate change?  Most certainly.  Was it man-made climate change?  Well, yes and no.

We don't know how the ensuing flood affected polar life, deep ocean life or many other questions but we do know that it judged human life.  It was sent by God the creator but the cause was Man the sinner.

It has been argued that this was the first rainfall, a thought more persuasive if the rainbow after the flood was also the first rainbow as is implied.  But nowhere does the Bible affirm this clearly (e.g. read here).  The significance of the rain days were that they represent a solemn length as ordained by God.  Whilst a day or two might just simply seem to happen - forty days never so.

The current fear factor of the coronavirus stems in part from its length of days.  As week follows week humans get the message that this is something to think and care about.  The forty days of rain were God's message that sin, concerning which humans are notoriously careless, is something to care about.

Lent is forty days for us to give it some thought in drier conditions.

Good and Bad

This has been a challenging week in London with the Westminster Bridge terrorist attack, an attack perpetrated by a man who we now seem to know more about than we do about members of our own family.  A little late though.

It was also the week when Martin McGuiness, former IRA Commander yet peacemaker was laid to rest - a man who died as an awkward kind of hero, a key to the Peace process that he had earlier been a key figure in making necessary.

These two men who died challenge our assessment of human goodness and badness. 

It is clear that those who knew Adey the youngster often (but not always) regarded him as incapable of anything like what he did on Wednesday.   Somewhere he seemed to have gone bad.  Yet even that doesn't quite work as the hotel he stayed in the night before the atrocity found him to be a very pleasant guest.

As a youngish man Martin McGuiness was certainly marked out by many outside his immediate community as a great deal of trouble.  To what extent he was directly or indirectly involved in acts of terrorism eventually became a subject off limits.  Yet most saw in his championing of the Northern Ireland Peace Process (at considerable personal risk and cost) something heroic or at least laudable.

The easy thing to say is that there is bad and good in all of us.  The harder thing is how we judge it.  The best thing to say is that we really can't and that the Judge of all the earth (Genesis 18:25) will need to be left to do what is right.

Magna Carta

Freedom is a strangely elusive idea.  Instinctively we want it, value it, demand it, yet it is much less clear what it really is.  

Take the striking opening of the Magna Carta, and one of the only four of its clauses that remain in contemporary English Law:

• I. FIRST, We have granted to God, and by this our present Charter have confirmed, for Us and our Heirs for ever, that the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable. 

This might warm the heart, one would think, of any Christian. Yet strangely it did not work out quite as this reads.  After all, it was the Monarchy that effectively changed the Church of England (on account of Henry VIII's marital woes) into a non-Roman Church.  That seems some way short of the Church being free of the monarch as the Charter indicated.

Then there have been the times when, whatever freedoms the Church did enjoy it used against other expressions of church and religion.  You would have to look very hard to find any other longstanding expressions of Church on the actual City of London (which is a double irony as the freedoms of the City of London are also contained as a remaining Law from Magna Carta).

Then there is the irony that the institutional Church of England (which Magna Carta most obviously references) is, in fact, the least free of all expressions of Church with a multitude of things it can't do, must do, must have and may not have.

On the bright side, it offers an early trend toward freedom of religion in a broader sense, and one which is happily still respected (though losing ground through the double whammy of militant Islam and rampant secular Humanism).

What it most confirms - and this I think is truly frightening - is that the basis of what old King John did was under the watchful eye of God - We have granted to God.  A society that no longer believes it is answerable to God and where pockets of it believe in a God of vengeance and violence is not likely for too long to hold dear the idea of freedom.  Oppression is so much more human (as Cain effectively said).

Literally AVD

Great regret has been expressed regarding Nick Clegg, our Deputy Prime Minister, who said in a keynote speech last weekend,

It makes people so incredibly angry when you are getting up early in the morning, working really hard to try and do the right thing for your family and for your community, you are paying your taxes and then you see people literally in a different galaxy who are paying extraordinarily low rates of tax.

If these people are literally in a different galaxy they are not, of course, liable for UK tax of any sort. Literally none. This is the kind of linguistic torture that many a public speaker (Guilty, m'Lud) inflicts on words.  Someone colourfully described it as AVD - Adjectival Vomiting Disease! 

Literally, for Nick, meant nothing of the sort.  In fact it means the opposite - metaphorically in a different galaxy, perhaps.

For all who claim to be Bible believers the word 'literally' is a heavily significant one.  The problem is that it is a word that serves us less well than we think.  For example,

"Do you believe there was a literal Good Samaritan?" is a fairly irrelevant question, though sometimes asked, compared to the more sobering, "Do you literally do what Jesus taught his hearer to do?"

Huge controversy surrounds the question, "Are the days in Genesis chapter 1 literal 24 hour days?" yet this is hardly a question at all.  Richard Dawkins, for example, believes that they are.  It's just that he inconveniently thinks that they are wrong.  Literal interpretation is not the same thing as faith.  Others believe that they are literal days in a piece of poetry.  Others believe they are not literal 24 hour days but believe they describe literal eras of creating.  Others believe that there were indeed seven 24 hour days but then have to wrestle with how the Word that spoke life to the dead in a moment took a whole 24 literal hours to create (or how the other 23+ hours did not constitute literal rest (which belongs to day seven)).  All of which is to say that literally is literally one of the more difficult words and concepts.

There are places where it is THE word however;

¹ Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. ² By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain ³ For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴ that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. ⁶ After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷ Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, ⁸ and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. ⁹ For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. ¹⁰ But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them— yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. ¹¹ Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.' [1 Corinthians 15] 

The Apostle is not vomiting adjectives; he is listing evidences.  It would reveal so much less if he had written that Jesus was literally risen from the dead.  Instead he shows how this must have happened, how we can know it happened, why it happened and why it matters.  Without a risen Saviour everything else about being human is ultimately useless.  Literally.

Beginning

Genesis 1:1 in the original Hebrew reads;

(At/In the) beginning created/filled God[Elohim] the heavens/skies and the earth.

Like most Hebrew translations there is, as you can see a different order and several alternatives. Who'd be a translator!? My point however is the simplest and first word of all. Beginning.

For millennia this was taken as insignificant compared to the next two words 'created' and 'God'. However, it turns out to be as important a word as any in the Scriptures. Why? Because in ongoing scientific discovery it has finally become inevitable that the planet and indeed the universe had a beginning. Previously this could only be assumed (or revealed!).

The significance of this can be seen in observation of Professor Stephen Hawking,
Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.

John Maddox, former editor of Nature magazine bewailed the idea of a beginning because it gave creationists 'ample justification for their beliefs.'

But you do not need to be a supposedly clever person to know that if there once was nothing and now there is something, then the secret isn't a selection process but an intervention.

And the question then becomes, whodunnit?