When Abraham Judged God

A little while ago at church we talked about Genesis 18 - you know, the one where Abraham "bargains with God" to prevent the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.  This is a particularly rich and interesting passage, and a lot of good points can be made from it, but I had a thought about it that maybe... er... a bit different.  I'll see what you think about it.

Let's consider how Abraham starts the famous conversation after he learns that God is considering wiping Sodom and Gomorrah from the planet:

23 Then Abraham approached him and said: “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? 24 What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? 25 Far be it from you to do such a thing—to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

This is absolutely fascinating to me.  Check out that language: "Far be it from you!"  Twice!  Asking if God will "do right!"  Let's be frank about what Abraham is doing here.  As best as I can figure, he is judging God.  He is accusing God of doing something wrong (or potentially wrong, at least) by destroying the two cities.  From my perspective, of course, this is an absolutely ludicrous thing to say, as it's God who defines right and wrong, not us.  But Abraham doesn't seem to see any irony in his own words.  I imagine that Abraham is legitimately and emotionally grieved and angered by God's plan.

Why?  Well, Abraham's nephew Lot and his family are there, for one thing.  Perhaps Abraham is being totally upfront with his argument - he just doesn't like the idea of whole cities getting judged and destroyed, when innocent people (relatives of his or otherwise) might get caught in the crossfire.  Abraham apparently imagines that God has not thought of this already, and this provokes righteous anger in Abraham.  "HOW DARE YOU" he is basically saying to God.  That's a pretty serious thing to say.

Now, notice how God reacts.  If you've read the book of Job, you might imagine that God will respond with two chapters or more of "putting Abraham in his place," reminding him who is actually sovereign, and who is not.  But that's not what he says:

26 The Lord said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

Well, gee.  All right, then.  That was easy.

Perhaps a little too easy.

Notice that immediately Abraham is not satisfied with this:

27 Then Abraham spoke up again: “Now that I have been so bold as to speak to the Lord, though I am nothing but dust and ashes, 28 what if the number of the righteous is five less than fifty? Will you destroy the whole city for lack of five people?”

I find this humorous, although I suppose I shouldn't, as the subject matter is pretty awful.  But nonetheless, I have to imagine that as easily as God agreed, the first thought passing through Abraham's mind must have been, "Uh oh... what if there's not fifty righteous people?  Fifty's an awfully big number... maybe it'd be safer to try 45."  (Notice how he backs away from his earlier tone and becomes a touch more humble - is he realizing he might have overstepped his bounds a bit with his previous tirade?)

And again, God agrees easily, but even that's not good enough. And so he "negotiates" God down step by step - 45, 40, 30, 20, and finally 10.  And each time, God agrees simply and calmly without argument or criticism.

In the next chapter God rains burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah.

Apparently 10 wasn't a low enough number.

I have heard people in various Sunday School classes and so forth make the case that this is a prime example of intercessory prayer changing God's mind.  While there are other Bible stories that demonstrate this, that's not what this particular case is, I don't think.  Rather, this is a prime example of God gently and mercifully changing Abraham's mind.

Abraham did not trust God.  He lashed out in anger at God, morally judging his intentions.  He believed himself to be a better arbiter of good and evil than God.  But over the course of the conversation, without God having to say even one single cross word - simply by agreeing with Abraham over and over - Abraham starts to gradually realize that God might have a far better idea of how many righteous people there are in the cities, and whether they deserved destruction, than Abraham.  Maybe God already stayed his hand for a very long time for the sake of innocent people (recall how the Israelites couldn't enter the Promised Land until the sin of the Canaanites was complete).  Maybe Abraham started to realize that God's justice and wisdom and mercy is beyond ours, and that Abraham wasn't telling God anything he didn't already know.

In the next chapter, God (rather forcibly) leads Abraham's relatives out of the city before destroying it, explicitly for Abraham's sake.  God took care of Abraham, even though I would've thought God would've been insulted and angered by Abraham's lack of trust.

And honestly, that's kind of convicting to me.  I hear people judging God all the time - and I don't mean just people understandably caught up in the emotions of grief, or people honestly wrestling with questions.  I mean people just straight up accusing God of doing wrong - the things he allows, does, or doesn't do.  "Far be it from you!" and so forth.  My gut-level reaction to this is to want to respond with mockery and sarcasm.  It's so obviously foolish and self-defeating.  I want God to "speak from the whirlwind" as he did at the end of Job, putting everybody in their place.

But that's not always what God does.  I'm not even convinced that's mostly what God does.  He didn't with Abraham, after all.  He responded gently, quietly, with mercy, allowing Abraham to work things out on his own.  It's possible that there are cases where we need to rebuke judgmental thinking about God, but I suspect there are more cases where we need to respond with the mercy and patience and understanding that God showed.

What do you think?

How Should We Respond to Feeling Judged?

Let's talk about judgment (yay!).  I've heard a lot of sermons and Sunday School lessons on the topic of whether we should judge - a very important topic.  Jesus's discussion of judging others in the Sermon on the Mount and Paul's discussion of the topic in the first few chapters of Romans is absolutely worth spending time on.  But there's a different, related question that I feel wasn't covered nearly enough in the church circles I grew up in: how should you, as a Christian, respond when someone else is judging you?

As I watch (and sometimes try hard not to watch) social media and American culture, I get the impression that this topic is becoming increasingly important.  There's a lot - a lot - of judgment and criticism being thrown around, and it's not the easiest thing in the world to respond well to.  I know I certainly don't.  And in fact, I would argue that I'm very much not alone in that.  A lot of people - both inside and outside the church - react very poorly (shall we say) to other people's judgment.

Have you ever found yourself on social media wondering, "How could that person possibly believe that obviously false thing?" or "How could that person possibly maintain such a flagrant double standard with a straight face?" or "How could that person possibly support X politician from X political party that does X horrible things?" or "Why does that person feel the need to constantly spew venom all over Facebook and Twitter?  Why can't they ever take a break to talk about puppies?"  I am starting to believe that, a huge percentage of the time, such behavior is a defensive reaction to feeling judged.

How, you may ask?  Well, consider how YOU feel when you are judged or criticized.  If you are a human being like I am, the odds are it's going to make you angry and defensive.  It is remarkable to me how much we value our honor.  I keep hearing Americans talk about "honor cultures" as though they only existed in some remote part of Central Asia or on Klingon spaceships, but yes, even we Americans care deeply about honor and shame.  There's only so much disrespect a person can tolerate - defense mechanisms eventually kick in and we start acting to regain what we've lost.  Granted, not everyone is as sensitive to honor and shame as others are.  But throw in the element of moral guilt, and now just about everybody is sensitive.  Some people can tolerate being thought ill of or treated disrespectfully.  Pretty much nobody can tolerate thinking of themselves as evil.  God designed us with a powerful intolerance of moral guilt.  We will go to extraordinary lengths to consider ourselves basically decent human beings.  If you accuse me of doing evil, I have to do something to prevent the accusation from landing.  And that something is often the source of a lot of ugliness.

Let's take an example.  Imagine that there's somebody in your workplace or school (or somewhere else where you have to be on a regular basis) who is a dietary zealot.  Maybe he's one of those paleo/CrossFit types, or a militant vegan, or a raw fruitarian, or an adherent to some new, crazy fad diet, but whichever way, this person not only feels that he has found a diet that works for him, but he has found the one true diet for all of humanity.  Especially you.  And every time you find yourself in the cafeteria or going out to eat with this person, you know you're about to get a lengthy lecture.  He's going to smirk at your hastily packed lunch and roll his eyes a lot.  Maybe he's going to make jokes about how you're slowly killing yourself with your processed garbage.  It won't take long before this guy is going to seriously get on your nerves.

However, you might actually be able to tolerate this to some degree.  You might be pretty secure in your self-image.  There's a chance you won't feel any need to react to this, even if it goes on for years.  But now imagine that he starts throwing in a moral element to his criticisms.  Maybe that ham sandwich is cruelty to animals.  Maybe that allegedly healthy whole-grain sandwich is somehow contributing to planetary destruction via global warming.  Maybe the diabetes of which you will very shortly die is going to bankrupt the country's medical system.  Maybe feeding your children like that is tantamount to child abuse.  But whatever the particulars of his argument are, the upshot is not just that you are foolish for eating your diet, but that you are wicked.  Now the ante is upped.  Eventually, the constant drumbeat of moral indictment is going to build to a climax and provoke your defense mechanisms.  You're going to get angry.

And that anger is going to make you want to do 2 things, as anger does:

1. Punish the perpetrator
2. Morally indict the perpetrator

Given that you are an adult, you are unlikely to just go over and slug the guy in the face (although you may feel the urge).  But you will want to do something to cause him pain.  That's what anger does - it creates a need to punish.  We get better at resisting the urge as we age, but it's still there, boiling under the surface.  But that's not the only urge.  God designed human anger to be intimately tied to our sense of morality.  When someone does something that angers us, it's not enough that we don't like it - it must also be morally wrong.  The four-year-old boy who is put in time out for hitting his sister with a truck cries "It's not fair!  It's not fair!" about his punishment, even when most anybody else would find it the very definition of fairness.  Anger creates in us the powerful urge to moralize.  What was done to us must be cosmically unjust, and the person who did it must be wicked.

So going back to our friend the dietary zealot, we can see how his continual moral criticism of us might provoke a desire not just to punish him, but to judge him right back.  Throwing his judgment back in his face serves two purposes here - not only does it satisfy our anger, it also nullifies his moral judgment of us.  If he is wicked, he is in no place to criticize (or at least, that's how it feels).

What does this look like in practice?  Maybe another coworker comes by our office and casually refers to the zealot as a "self-righteous jerk" and we nod along grimly.  We latch onto the word "self-righteous" (or "judgmental" or "puritanical" or "priggish" or "hysterical" or "virtue signalling" or similar), as it makes it sound like his moral judgment of us is wicked somehow (and therefore unjustified), and that feels good.  Or maybe we see an article on Facebook about a scientfic study suggesting that the zealot's diet increases cancer risk by 3%.  Maybe we go ahead and click "Share" on that study without first checking to see if the study is any good.  Or maybe we latch onto the idea that it's his diet that's so harmful and evil, and the guy is a massive hypocrite (we LOVE the word "hypocrite," as though the problem was his failure to live up to his own standard, rather than the fact that he uses his standard to judge us).  The "fact" that his diet causes cancer may even become truer than truth to us.  It should be true, therefore it is true.  And why should it be true?  Because it proves that our moral accusers are wicked.  It restores our honor, and eliminates our guilt.  Maybe a new diet guru rises up who promises a more moral, healthier diet by eating all the opposite things that our coworker recommends ("It's the Krispy Kreme Kleanse!"), and we gradually start to become a devotee.  The articles and books from the guru "just make sense."  "It's like he's saying everything I've thought all these years, but couldn't articulate," we say.  Maybe the guru comes up with nasty nicknames for adherents to alternative diets, and we eat it up, and occasionally parrot the insults to others.  When we see one of our other coworkers head to the "heart-healthy" line of the cafeteria, we roll our eyes and make snide remarks at her.  And the circle is complete!  We have become the very thing we hated.

I believe that a tremendous amount of the judgment we experience is, in fact, defensive.  It's a reaction to previously experienced judgment, protecting and shoring up a person's honor and moral status.  That Facebook "friend" spewing hateful invective all over your social media feeds is likely to be doing so because somebody else was spewing hateful invective to them.  In the same way that violence spawns violence, judgment spawns judgment.  Moral accusation is frequently retaliatory.

What does this mean?

It means somebody's gotta stop the cycle.

Which is why I think it's important to figure out how not to react defensively to human judgments.  For a Christian to be able to "judge not" as Jesus commanded, it would help a lot, I think, to "react not."  We will be a lot less likely to judge our neighbors if we do not allow our defensive anger to control us.

But how do you do that?  If my own experience has taught me anything, it's that underreacting to people's judgment is extremely challenging.  Of course, it could be that I'm a lot more sensitive than most people (at least, I hope that's true, for everyone else's sake!), but I suspect I am not alone in feeling the need to judge people back.  And what makes it harder is that there's no avoiding other people's judgment!  You have no real control over whether other people condemn you.  You can pretty much expect judgment to come your way.

Jesus says as much himself.  There are two things that Jesus said that sum this up extremely well:

1. "You will be hated by everyone because of me." (Matthew 10:22)
2. "[The world] hates me because I testify that its works are evil." (John 7:7)

As Christians, we could be as kind, generous, loving, and merciful as we possibly could be (and we should be!), and some people will still hate and judge us.  Why?  Because we are aligned with Jesus, who judges them.  And we can't change that.  God created us and instructed us on how he wants us to live - what he wants us to do with our time, money, relationships, sexuality, and energy.  And we would really rather not live that way.  So humanity reacts to God, to his judgment, and to anyone who aligns with him.  This is the awkward fact at the root of the issue: the cycle of judgment began with God.  So unless we disown God, hatred will certainly come our way from some people.  There will be people who want to throw God's judgment back in his face by judging him and the church.  There's no getting around it.

So how do we not add to the problem?  How do we not hate back?

The Bible is not silent on this subject.  As hated as you might feel by the hysterical people on social media, American Christians have absolutely nothing on the serious persecution affecting the early church.  Yet the Bible has a lot of words encouraging us to not hate back.  So here are some ideas that might be helpful, taken from scripture:

1. Remember the Greater Future Reward
   In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.  Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you."  Jesus isn't telling you to feel happy when you are insulted just because he said to.  He's offering you a reason to feel happy - there's a fantastic reward coming if you hold fast.  Remember that staying true to God's word and not responding to hatred with hatred will pay off in incredible ways in the long run.
2. Take Active Steps to Reconcile With People Where You Can
   Sometimes people are going to hate you for no good reason.  Other times, they'll be upset for something you did that you shouldn't have done, or something that can be fixed.  We need to make every effort to reduce and eliminate those times, and do what we can to make things right when we screw up.  Also in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus urges his followers: "if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift.  Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison."  If you can without violating God's principles, apologize!  Many times you can stop the cycle of judgment immediately.  Paul also talks about this in Romans 12: "Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone.  If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone."
3. Remember God's Character
   Here's Jesus again, from the Sermon on the Mount: "You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."  Check out that language - God provides good things to not just good people, but evil people as well.  And Jesus encourages us to do likewise - to do good to people regardless of their moral status.  What gives you the right to act in hatred where God does not?
4. Give Your Anger to God, He Will Repay
   In the book of Romans, Paul talks about revenge: "Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord."  If you are struggling with anger toward someone, remember that giving it to God does not mean justice will never be done.  It means that you are allowing God - the ultimate and righteous judge - to do his job, to judge and punish (and show mercy) as only he can.  It is easier to let go of anger knowing that justice is in the hands of the ultimate king.
5. Remember Jesus's Example
   It can be encouraging to remember that Jesus went ahead of us.  Consider the book of 1 Peter: "To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.  He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.  When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly."
6. Consider the Practical Benefits of Gentleness
   Peter also brings up another point: "Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander."  By being gentle and respectful, those observing stand a chance of seeing the hate that is driving your accusers, and therefore societal shame will work in your favor.
7. Remember What Really Justifies You
   We are justified by God's grace alone - if we understand our own sin, and how forgiven we are, we can work at resting our identities in God's justification.  That means that when someone judges us or rebukes us, we can humbly accept the parts that are true, and react with more self-control to the parts that aren't.  This isn't easy, of course, but I think it's something we can grow in.
8. Ask God for Help
   "Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened."  Non-retalation is hard.  Ask God for good gifts.

I feel like this is really just scratching the surface of this topic - arguably the entire book of 1 Peter is dedicated to it.  But hopefully this is a start, at least.

So I would really encourage you, whenever you feel judged or hated, to stop and take stock of what your defensiveness is making you want to do.  Then think of Jesus's example, let God handle the justice, and show mercy to your enemy.

Maybe, here and there, we can stop the cycle.

On Being "Just Sad"

I'm not super proud of this, but sometimes when I pray for "peace" for a person or a family that's experienced a loss, what I'm thinking deep down is something like, "Oh well, there's not much to pray for now, but peace is better than nothing I guess."

Well, I may not have had these thoughts exactly, but on some subconscious level, it's as though I place a value on things like physical healing - things that alleviate the immediate cause of suffering - whereas things like "peace," "strength," "wisdom," and so forth are just kind of nice, fluffy words that sound good but don't really mean anything.  They're things to pray for when you don't have anything better to pray for.

Can anyone relate to that, or am I alone in this?

I'm starting to realize something about this, though.

I think specifically back to last year when my dad passed away.  He was in the hospital for quite a long time, and had been sick in various ways a long time before that, so it was definitely not sudden or entirely unexpected, but it was still very difficult.

I remember one of my friends asking me a pretty awkward and blunt question during the week of the funeral - "So what's it like," he asked, "losing your dad?"  I was a little startled by this - it's not something I was super comfortable talking about, but I tried to answer anyway.  "I don't know..." I said.  "I'm just... sad."  "Just sad?" he repeated back.  "Yeah."  It may have sounded like a cop-out to him, but that's really all I had.  I was just sad.

In my head, I wondered whether he thought I ought to feel a stew of other emotions.  Was I supposed to be angry?  Guilty?  Hopeless?  Fearful or worried?  For the most part, I honestly wasn't any of those things.  And it occurred to me.  I easily could've been.  I could've been angry at doctors and hospitals for not doing what I thought they should've been doing (as clearly I know so much more than everyone).  I could've easily felt guilty for things I should've done better - ways I didn't help enough, or wasn't there enough.  In fact, at various points along the way, I had felt these things.  But right then, at the moment where my sadness peaked, I didn't feel any of that stuff.  Whatever anger and guilt I might have felt was gone.  There was no hopelessness, no fear.  Just sadness.

And although it feels a little weird to me to say, being "just sad" suddenly felt like a huge blessing.  And I mean blessing in a very literal sense.  It felt like being able to be "just sad" had been provided as a gift.  It felt like I was being prayed for, and consequently protected to some degree.  It was a surprisingly strong feeling.  The book of James famously tells us that "the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective," and it felt to me like there were people out there praying for peace for my family, and God, mercifully, was answering it -- in a way that I could understand and feel.

I think about one of my favorite passages in Philippians 4:

"6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. 7 And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus."

Do I believe that God will do that?  That God can give a peace that transcends all understanding?

I think he did.  It certainly transcended my understanding.

It turned out that peace, in that particular time, wasn't just a nice-sounding, fluffy word.  It was an actual, comprehensible, visceral gift.

This may be something that other long-time Christians are way ahead of me on, but where I am now, I'm starting to realize that things like "peace," "strength," and "wisdom" aren't just fluffy words that mean little - they're actual blessings that God can and does provide in ways that surprise and glorify him.  They're things we can ask for and things he can give, and they mean a lot.  And I'm grateful for it.

I know very well that not all prayers get answered the way we want, but there are times when God says "yes" to a prayer for peace, and I think it pays to keep those times in mind.  I now remember hearing other people share similar experiences in their own life - but I guess it takes experiencing it oneself to let it sink in sometimes.

So I encourage you to treat those prayers as prayers that God will answer, and in a way that people will notice, and will be to his glory.

How to Remember Which of Paul's Letters is Which

I like to think of myself as a "why" learner.  I learn things much better when you tell me why I should care - that is, when I have a larger framework to work from.  I got super frustrated in Algebra II when we learned about matrices (a system for organizing numbers into rectangular grids that involves a whole lot of pointless-feeling arithmetic).  I would ask the teacher, "Why?  What is this FOR?" and she would just say, "It'll be important in later math classes."  That didn't help.  It all felt very arbitrary.  I felt like I had to look up every formula every time because I didn't understand the PURPOSE that would have made it make sense.

Other math students were "how" learners, though.  They seemed to just want to be told what they needed to solve the problem, and anything else - any stories, any context, any larger framework - was just extraneous details that confused the issue.  They didn't mind straight-up memorization.  One time in college, when a substitute math professor came in, he told all kinds of funny stories and tried to explain the math from the perspective of why we care - I absolutely loved it, but I was shocked to hear other students complain afterwards about his teaching style.  Clearly, different people prefer to learn in different ways.

But perhaps there are other people out there who, like me, prefer "frameworks" to hang their knowledge on.  I CAN memorize lists of things for tests if I try hard, but I forget it pretty much immediately afterward.  But if you give me a framework for understanding things, I'm much more likely to retain the information later.

I feel that way about Bible knowledge.  As a kid, I remember wondering how grown-ups at church always seemed to be able to quote chapter and verse so often.  Sure, we had memory verses, and I would memorize them for Sunday School, but they didn't stay memorized long.  Is that what the adults were doing?  Memorizing a LOT of verses and which book and chapter they came from?  How did they retain all that info?

Growing up, the information in the Bible frequently felt unorganized - stories and teachings and individual verses would be quoted with no particular pattern to them, so it just seemed like the Bible was a random collection of stuff.  I had no idea how Sunday School teachers figured out which verses to have us go read.  It all seemed kind of mysterious.

It got a little better, though, as I got older.  At one point in Sunday School, they taught us a song with all the books of the New Testament.  Believe it or not, this was super helpful.  It meant that (at least for the New Testament), I didn't have to go to the table of contents to find any particular book.  I knew what order things were in, so I could flip there more or less quickly.  We had "Bible drills," where the teacher would call out a chapter and verse and we would race to see who could find it.  Unfortunately, if you had to stop and hum a few bars of the kid's song, you were at a distinct disadvantage.

Knowing the names of the books is helpful, but it's not really enough.  It still didn't tell me what each book was ABOUT, which is far more important.  One of the most helpful Sunday School lessons I ever had came from Jon Shoulders, our church's youth minister at the time, who came down to the kid's room to teach us about the different sections of the Bible.  This was HUGE to me.  I'm talking about how the first five books are the Law, then there's History, then there's Poetry, etc etc.  Suddenly the Bible felt organized!  I had a framework to go on.  Now if you asked me where such-and-such a story was, or such-and-such a teaching was, I had a much better chance of pointing you to the right part of the Bible, even if I couldn't have told you chapter and verse.

But is there anywhere else to go from there other than memorization?  Just read and keep reading the Bible and eventually get so familiar with it you can impress all your friends and relatives in class with your Bible knowledge (because, obviously, this is what impresses people...)?  Well, to some extent, yes.  But I wonder if there may be another in-between step that we could teach people that would help them bridge the gap somewhat.

That is, what if we came up with a way to succinctly describe what each book is ABOUT in a way that's easier to remember?  Like, say, one of the major themes of the book?

I remember a preacher named Jeff Walling actually did this at a youth rally when I was a teenager, and I really appreciated it.  He went over the four Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) and gave us a single word for each one to describe the difference between them.  The only one I remember exactly is the word for John: "Whoaaa..." said like a surfer.  But I remember the gist of them all.  John was the emotional gospel, the one about all the cool, deep, theologial connections.  Matthew was the Jewish-centric one, Luke was the Gentile-centric one, and Mark was the short one - straight and to the point.  Jeff Walling was giving me a framework.  Because of the way I learn, it was very, very helpful.

So could we do something like that for the whole Bible?  What about Paul's letters?  It's easy to feel like Paul's letters just kind of all run together in a big blob sometimes, but there really are different themes and focuses in each one.

So I'm gonna try something.  I'm gonna try to come up with a word or phrase for each of Paul's letters that describes a major theme or something distinctive about the book, and that STARTS WITH THE SAME LETTER as the book.  And then you can tell me, if you are a framework-based learner like me, if you think this would be helpful!  So here goes:

Romans: Redemption
1 Corinthians: Church
2 Corinthians: Collection
Galatians: Grace vs Legalism
Ephesians: Encouragement
Philippians: Peace
Colossians: Counter-asceticism
1 and 2 Thessalonians: The End of the World
1 and 2 Timothy, Titus: Tending the Flock
Philemon: Personal letter

There may be better choices for some of these - perhaps you could help me think of some!  But I like the general idea.

Romans is a tough one, as it's so central and so important - it's basically the full gospel explained in lengthy detail.  So "redemption" covers a lot, but then, so does "reconciliation," "righteousness", and "right with God."  Could be the "roadmap to reconciliation."  Or "all roads lead to Romans."  There are a number of possibilities.

Thessalonians is also tricky, because the theme is so clear - dealing with Jesus's second coming - but that phrase (or anything related I can think of) doesn't start with T.  But maybe sticking a big "THE" in there is just silly enough to be memorable!

Most of the others I feel a little better about.  Ephesians really is a very positive, encouraging letter.  Philippians has a lot to say about peace (and joy) - the famous "peace that passeth understanding" passage is there.  Colossians is about more than fighting off bad theology like asceticism, but it's definitely in there.  Galatians could be just "grace," but it's such a combative book I feel like a "vs." is required.  1 Corinthians covers a lot of stuff about church practices and has a lot about church unity - communion, speaking in tongues, worship, etc.  To reduce 2 Corinthians to an appeal for money might go too far - but even though there's more to it than JUST that, it's still a big part of the book.  Timothy and Titus have a lot of stuff about being an elder or a deacon, or how to run the church as a practical matter.

So what do you think?  Would something like this be helpful?  How would you summarize Paul's letters?

And then, a bonus challenge... can you do it for the Minor Prophets? (sinister laugh)