Uncultured

It's easy for us to make the argument that our culture is giving us the opportunity to interpret God's Word, finally, the way that He always wanted us to - against the culture of the day it was written. We see the women and the weak and the powerless and the outcast, and we think, yes, this is what we're doing and this is what God is doing; we're on the same page. 

But what if we're not?

This is, I think, where we can really see our cultural lens most dominantly, if we're willing to really look at it. 

We see God using women, and we think that He was doing it to be countercultural. We see Jesus eating with the outcasts, and we think He was doing it to be countercultural. We see healers in the New Testament touching the unclean, and we think they were doing it to be countercultural, to turn things on their head. 

What if God just doesn't care about culture?

What if God cares about hearts? 

This is, I think, the rub. I think that God uses the men and women He uses in the Bible, that He chooses them, based on the characteristics of their heart, not to make a point about the world that we live in and the culture we've created. 

Remember, this is the same God who had to give His people a culture to even start with. Left on their own, they would be wholly barbaric and not even do the most basic things to care for one another. We call this "the Law." He had to tell them things like that they ought to return things they borrow, build safety walls around their roofs, not take things that don't belong to them, stay committed to one another. God created the kind of culture that He wanted His people to live in. 

And while we can get hung up, if you want to, I guess, on the fact that masculine pronouns are used most often in this, I think that's missing the point. I think that's getting caught up in what our own culture is trying to tell us about gender and identity and not really catching the heart of the message, which is that God Himself created for us the kind of culture that He wanted us to have. Not as patriarchal or gender concrete or cis or whatever other buzzword you want to put on it, but as friends, brothers and sisters, neighbors, and...all the way back in Genesis when togetherness even started...helpmeets. If you read the very first accounts of male and female, there is no patriarchy; there is equality. That was God's design. 

The rest is the curse. Which, by the way, we're still living under, no matter how "enlightened" we think we're becoming. 

I think God looks at a person's heart and at a person's relationships and at a person's positions and uses them in exactly the way that He wants to. I think He groans when we read our Bible and try to make a social hierarchy out of it, create some kind of dynamic that was never intended. I think when He watches us raise the woman and the outcast and the gender fluid and all that other stuff, what He sees is the way we lower others to trod them under the same feet we regret having tread former ground on. I think He looks at the way that we're trying to twist the Bible through our postmodern cultural lens, and He mourns because we're just not getting it. 

The Bible is about erasing lines, not redrawing them. And no matter how right we think we are, every time we simply shift them, we are still getting it wrong. 

I read this little word, "women," in the psalms and saw God using them in His army to bring the good news, and I wondered if this was one of those things I was supposed to be paying attention to as a signal that God actually prefers our culture over Israel's. It immediately jumped out to me. 

But it didn't take long before I realized that was my culture speaking and not my Lord. 

The message God wants us to hear is not that women are running...but that the faithful are running. Running to share the Good News. 

Lord, in the words of the mighty warrior, let me run.