Dear Friends,
As I was sitting on my back deck the other day a beautiful robin came hopping across my yard. She stopped, stood still, and then plunged her head into the ground and pulled out a worm.
How did she know the worm was there? I wondered.
My wife and I bandied about some theories, and our best guess was that she could hear the worm moving under the soil. It turns out that we weren’t wrong. Hearing is a factor, but along with other multifaceted sensory inputs. And that just blows my mind.
I have a follow-up question: If a bird’s auditory sensitivity is so refined that it can hear a worm crawling underground, why is it that when the airplane engine was roaring above her, and that truck out front was rumbling down the street, the dog across the way was barking, a myriad of other birds were chirping and frolicking in the yard, and humans were talking in comparatively loud voices, she could still hear it?
And another follow-up: If a bird’s auditory senses are that sensitive, why doesn’t the bird’s head—I don’t know—“explode” when I yell at it? Don’t you imagine that if you could hear some micro sound amplified enough for it to be loud, that an actual, you know, macro sound would deafen you?
So birds can focus their their hearing, filtering out distractions. The loudest thing does not mean the most important thing. And they can somehow “tune” their ears to keep from being overwhelmed by loud noises. Or perhaps another way: the noises are somehow filtered and adapted for bird consumption.
The Proverbs tell us to look to the animal kingdom to get wisdom. And the elegant robin seems a fitting tutor for our time.
Listen To Me…
“Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one!” (Dt. 6:4)
“Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me, that your soul may live.” (Is. 55:2)
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us” (Jn. 1:14)
“Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Dt. 8:3; Mt. 4:4)
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.” (Mt. 7:24).
“This is my beloved Son, whom I love; with him I am well-pleased. Listen to him!” (Mt. 17:5).
If we focus a little bit and do some internal filtering of our own, it is amazing how often the scriptures are telling us to listen to God. His Word, Jesus tells us, is a necessity of life—just as important as bread. Just as a robin listens for her food, we must listen for ours. And it comes with a great promise: our souls will delight in the “richest of fare.”
Let me extrapolate a few things. The first is a doctrinal or theoretical point, followed by some practical points.
First, God’s “speaking” in special revelation is a necessity. There is a longstanding, subtle, and complicated debate in Christian history over the relationship between God’s “general” revelation in nature (say, looking at the robin) and his “special” revelation in scripture (God telling me to look at the robin—Matt. 6:26). Some accounts seem to maintain that human beings get along just fine without “special” divine speech. That we know ourselves and the world with our own reason and sensory input, and that when God directly speaks in various ways (e.g., the Bible) it is kind of an “extra” to help us confirm our knowledge, perhaps even nudge or correct us where we go wrong, or to simply give us knowledge of the “special’ things that are above and beyond our reason or senses (e.g., the truths of salvation). The Bible is conceived as kind of a tool for or supplement to “ordinary” life. Nice to have, but not entirely necessary, strictly speaking.
Others can imply that scripture is given to us because of sin. That is, because human beings are fallen and cannot rightly see and interpret the world around them, God graciously speaks directly to correct our corrupted minds and senses. Calvin taught that scripture provides the “spectacles” that bring reality into proper focus. This is certainly true, but it raises the question whether humans would have any need for God’s special, direct revelation if Adam had not sinned. (Calvin, by the way, said, “Yes, we would.”)
Jesus speaks to all of these issues in one remarkable statement. Tempted by the devil to supply his own food in the wilderness, he quotes Deuteronomy 8:
“Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” —Mt. 4:4
The first point seems obvious enough: human beings need God’s speech, every bit as much as they need physical food. Far from a supplemental, take-it-or-leave-it view of special revelation, Jesus believes that it is necessary for life itself. In other words, for human beings to truly live—that is, to live as God designed and intended—they must have divine speech. It is food.
Now, you may want to follow up with Jesus and ask, “Sure, Jesus; but would we need God’s special revelation if we weren’t sinners?”
The person making this claim is the only sinless One who ever lived.
This is one of those things you cannot “unsee” once you’ve seen it. Jesus, the perfect, sinless man, a person with uncorrupted reason and spotless moral integrity claims that he needs his Father’s revelation. Our doctrinal questions are therefore answered: God’s speech is not a supplement for human nature, something we “add on” to knowledge otherwise gained. It is a necessary design feature of what it means to be God’s “image and likeness.” Never for a moment did God intend to be the great Deistic “clockmaker,” winding up the world and just letting it run on its own terms. His direct involvement, his Word in all its manifold richness—narrative speech, songs, poetry, wisdom, warnings, promises—is something we need, not just because of sin but because we are his creatures.
The practical applications almost write themselves, don’t they?
Focus on Food — The world is so very loud. The myriad voices that vie for our attention form a deafening cacophony. That’s the context, by the way, of Isaiah 55, which I quoted above. The scene is a marketplace, and God is taking the role of a vendor shouting to the crowds: “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy, and eat!”
Like our sweet robin friend, we must ignore the barking dogs and the deluge of distractions and listen for our food, and we find it precisely where Jesus found it: in the written Word of God. “Have you not read?” was one of his favorite questions, and it ought to convict us every time he asks.
You Are What You Eat —We eat what we like, but it is also true that our consumption and diet shapes and forms us. This is true of our spiritual, intellectual, and artistic consumption. A woman consumed with fashion magazines will, without even realizing it, start trying to look like a model in a fashion magazine. A man consumed with his credit card limit will, without even knowing it, become like the piece of plastic he treasures: thin and (morally) flexible. And he won’t pay attention to his own expiration date.
Like our sweet robin, we should seek above all else the food designed for us. Jesus tells us that it his Father that provides for the birds, and so he provides for us. And his provision for us is himself, the Word who became flesh. “Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who build his house upon the rock.”
God speaks, and he speaks so our bird-brains can hear.
Miscellany
Related to our topic today, we’ve been worshiping for the first time in our lives in a very “high church” liturgical setting—at least higher than we’ve been used to. I was raised in a fairly informal presbyterian setting, and the typical critique I always heard is that the more liturgical churches did not place as high a value on the Word as they do the Sacrament. Well, I can report that in my experience it’s a caricature. We’ve been frankly blown away at the amount of Scripture we read and pray every Sunday. God’s Word is food, and I must say that the portions have been huge.
My iPhone 6’s (second) battery decided it longer wanted to retain electricity so I finally acquired a new phone. With my purchase I was given a year’s free subscription to AppleTV. I was delighted to learn that I could stream ESPN’s documentary series The Last Dance. It tells the story of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls as they attempt their sixth NBA championship, in 1997-98. You know how sometimes you remember things as better than they actually were? This is not like that. Michael Jordan was even better than I remember, which I hardly thought possible. There’s a special room in the sports pantheon for those were were not only the greatest of all time, but such dominant forces they will forever be the standard against which all others are judged, and I can only come up with three occupants of that room: Babe Ruth, Tiger Woods, and Michael Jordan.
I love great songwriters and musicians, and like to pass along the good ones I find. I’ll let bluegrass musician Molly Tuttle have the last word, because it reflects how I think of this newsletter by this time every week: There comes a time to say that’s ‘good enough.’