tests and questions
We kicked off our fall preaching series last weekend. I am excited to dig into these first chapters of Revelation with you. Thanks for your great questions, insights, and general curiosity about how to get in this book and get this book in you. Feel free to tweet (@dmhanke, #restorationva), comment on blogs, or post on my FB wall here and here. The discussion is an encouragement to everyone!
In addition to Revelation, we are slowly reading through John 6 each week. As I said on Sunday, I want to encourage you to re-visit this during your daily quiet times. Jesus does a radical thing– feeds 5000 people. Then Jesus spends a while very self-consciously reflecting on what that feeding means. His explicit candor about ‘the bread of life’ makes a bunch of His disciples leave. Their comment? ‘This is a hard saying, who can listen to it??’ So let’s mull it over, chew on it, and see what God has to say to us.
2 thoughts on John 6:6-9
Philip and the TEST: On Sunday, as soon as Erin read, “He said this to test him…” I groaned. This theme seems to be coming up a lot at Restoration: God tests His people. The tests check their faith, stretch their faith, increase their trust, expose where trust is weak… But viscerally, I always balk. God, I don’t want to be tested, I want to be given everything I need. 🙂 Just keeping it real. But God does test us. And we would be served by leaning in to the lesson and asking for opportunities to demonstrate our trust. God tests us to refine us. God tests us to make us look more like Christ. Even more… God tests us to encourage us!! So that we can see the good character work He is doing in us.
However, for Philip, the ‘test’ spins him into a tizzy. He blusters, where would we get enough money to give all these people just a bite? He makes grocery lists, calculates labor costs, projects how long it will take… I am very familiar with this tizzy. God, you want me to do what?? How? When? With who? bluster, bluster, bluster.
Andrew and the question: Andrew sees the same situation. Andrew has a different response: ‘Jesus, there is a kid here with a lunch– a few loaves and some sardines’. It’s food, but not nearly enough. ‘What are they for so many?’
This is who I want to be: impossible situation, helpful assessment of meager resources, then the right question to the right person. Jesus, how are YOU going to do this?
God, help me to see the resources you have provided (even when they seem very small). And help me to ask YOU the questions that only You can answer. Help me to trust you.
Hope you are having a great week.
-David
September 21, 2011 @ 5:10 pm
I’ll admit that when I read that “testing” verse, I kind of wanted to skip over it, too. Reflexively, I don’t like the idea of Jesus testing anybody. Or, more precisely, of his testing ME — he can test others all he wants. 🙂
But then I started thinking about what Jesus did to test Philip: He asked him a question. That’s it. He didn’t do anything to him or require anything of him. He just asked a diagnostic question, one that would let him–and Philip himself–see where Philip was on the getting-and-trusting-Jesus spectrum.
And THAT got me thinking… When God tests people elsewhere in scripture, what does he do to them? Because I realized that I had this idea that when God tests us, it means that he makes us go through something really hard and terrible to see whether we’ll be faithful to him. But that didn’t really seem to be the nature of Jesus’ test of Philip. So maybe I had this wrong?
So I did a cursory search, looking at every instance where “test” is used in the Bible. [Disclaimer: I used one translation. I didn’t look at Hebrew or Greek. I didn’t search for tested or testing or the other iterations of the word. So this isn’t authoritative — just a starting place.] There were 59 of them. What I found was really surprising to me:
1) The Bible has a LOT more instances of humans testing God than of God testing humans. And even though God has told them not to test him (because, you know, he’s God and they’re not), he is often gracious in responding and doing what people ask him to do.
2) Sometimes when God tests people, he does it by giving them GOOD stuff and seeing how they respond. Example: Exodus 16, where God gives the Israelites manna in the wilderness to see “whether they will walk in my law or not.” He’s basically saying, “I’ve told you to follow me and I’ll give you what you need. Here’s proof. Now, are you going to do it?”
3) I didn’t find ONE instance where God does something bad to someone or causes something bad to happen to them in order to test them. James 1:13 says, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.” It seems to hold true for God causing harm to people in order to test them. He just doesn’t seem to do it.
What I learned is that for God, testing seems more to be about finding out (or more likely, helping us see) what we’re made of, like you bite on a piece of gold to see how pure it is, or put a little bit of weight on a tree branch while climbing before you trust it with your whole weight. Where are we in our faith? How much are we ready to handle? Where could we stand a little purifying, a little strengthening?
This helps me see Jesus’ testing Philip a little differently — as more loving and gracious. My hope is that it helps me to be more open to where God might be testing me, and to trust that he’s being loving and gracious with me, too.