Today's Scripture Reading (May 6, 2021): 2 Peter 2
We are used to our movies, and
especially children's stories, asking us to believe in the impossible. We know
that snowmen can't talk, notwithstanding watching Frosty sing and dance every
Christmas and listening to Olaf say that he "likes warm hugs" in "Frozen."
Dr. Doolittle speaks with the animals, a talent he picked up in Polynesia,
where he learned that various animal species talk to each other. It was then
that he decided to study animal languages. But we know that it is just a story.
Animals don't speak, not really. Some domesticated animals can learn to
understand portions of our language, but we don't really understand theirs.
Sometimes we treat the Bible in the
same way. Some of the language in the Bible is ancient and is immersed in old
superstitions. Other passages are strictly poetic. As God talks to Job, he asks
the Prophet, "Have you entered the
storehouses of the snow or seen the storehouses of the hail"
(Job 38:22)? Whether the author of the story understood it or not, we know that
those storehouses don't exist. Snow and hail are natural phenomenons, and no
storehouses are involved. But the description of the storehouses in the sky is
an excellent example of poetic descriptions of our experienced reality.
We
know what the ancients didn't; that whales or any other known fish cannot
swallow a person, let alone eat them and then cough them up on shore, alive,
three days later. And regardless of what the author of Numbers might argue,
donkeys are incapable of speech. Often, we treat these passages with a healthy
dose of skepticism as if they were just another snowman named Olaf, sliding
through the snow wishing for the onset of summer and a warm hug. Maybe the
ancients really believed that this was possible, but we know that it isn't.
And
then Peter pulls us back into reality. He admits that's donkeys don't talk,
except that with Balaam, one did. Balaam was rebuked by his donkey because Balaam
wasn't listening to anyone else. God had designed a unique way to get Balaam's attention;
he made the donkey talk. If that happened to us, it would grab our attention too.
Peter
puts his finger on the thing that we sometimes miss. It is not that ancient
cultures didn't know any better. With some things, like storehouses filled with
snow, they spoke with poetic emphasis. But sometimes they knew how "fairy
tale-like" their stories might sound, but the problem is that these things
happened. Balaam knew that donkeys don't talk with a human's voice. And yet,
his donkey spoke. Big fish don't swallow people only to cough them up three days
later, alive on the shore. Yet, that is precisely what happened to Jonah.
Sometimes God steps into our reality and does something unbelievable just to
get our attention. And regardless of the fairy-tale nature, Peter assures us
that these events really happen.
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: 2 Peter 3
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