My extended family for being up for the journey
Kristen, shall we go another eleven?
MOVEMENT ONE: JUMP
1 Marcus Borg explains this idea extremely well in his book The Heart of Christianity (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003).
2 John 14:9.
3 I first came across the phrase “lined up” in Cornelius Plantinga’s book Engaging God’s World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002).
4 John 1:14.
5 This fact, of course, doesn’t make the doctrine any less true. It’s been true all along; people just “recently” discovered it.
6 Deuteronomy 4:12; see also verse 15.
7 Job 11:7. God also says in Isaiah 55:8, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways.” It is written like this in the Psalms: “His understanding has no limit” (147:5).
8 Exodus 3:14.
9 Exodus 33:23.
10 It’s interesting that we measure days by the sun and moon, which weren’t created until day four.
11 Matthew 19:28; Acts 3:21; Colossians 1:20.
12 See Matthew 25:41.
13 Luke 14:16–24.
14 David Rylaarsdam from Calvin Theological Seminary makes a great point about questioning God: In Job 42:7, God indicates that he is angry with the questions of Job’s three friends, which is paralleled in the gospels when the religious leaders try to trap Jesus with their questions. But Job’s friends and the Pharisees had a smug sense of arrival about their theology. The psalmists, by contrast, demonstrate humility about their understanding of God, and their questions arise out of the context of faith (even if it is weak faith mixed with much doubt). So the psalmists are able to ask even tougher questions of God than the Pharisees: “My God, my God, you said you would not forget your children, and now you’re hiding your face from me. I don’t get it! Where are you? I’m getting hammered here. Why?”
15 Genesis 18.
16 Exodus 3–4.
17 Take a look at I Asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology by Abraham Joshua Heschel, edited by Samuel Dresner (New York: Crossroad Classic, 1983).
18 Robert Farrar Capon deals with this in his book The Fingerprints of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). Go out and buy all of his books and read them immediately.
19 If you really want to know, this is from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense (1999).
20 1 John 4:8, my emphasis.
21 This is quoted from Entertainment Weekly (6 February 2004).
22 I heard Dwight Pryor say this several years ago. Dwight is about as close as you can get to a Christian rabbi, and he has deeply influenced me. Check out his teachings at www.jcstudies.com.
23 David Rylaarsdam provided me with this insight.
24 Read everything John Piper has ever written, beginning with The Dangerous Duty of Delight (Sisters, OR: Multnomah, 2001).
25 Psalm 37:4.
26 Matthew 7:13–14.
27 Philippians 4:7.
MOVEMENT TWO: YOKE
1 Joshua 6.
2 2 Corinthians 11:23.
3 1 Corinthians 7:12.
4 1 Corinthians 7:4.
5 Leviticus 19:18.
6 Exodus 20:8.
7 Matthew 11:30.
8 Matthew 5:17.
9 My version of Jesus’s words in Matthew 5.
10 Matthew 3:11.
11 Matthew 3:17.
12 Matthew 3.
13 Luke 20:2–3, my paraphrase.
14 Matthew 5:21–22, 27–28, 31–32, 33–34, 38–39, 43–44.
15 See Anchor Bible Dictionary 1.743–45 (New York: Doubleday, 1992) and Walter Bauer et al. A Greek-English Lexicon
