Job's Leviathan, Loving Your Limits, and God's Gift Economy
Good debt and the defeat of evil. Plus, why you feel like you're not doing enough.
Three Things Is Launching a Bible Course
We’ll be looking at the biblical theology of the images of water, gardens, and mountains in the Bible – from Genesis to Revelation.
We’ll dedicate two weeks of this 6-week course to each of the three images. To see what passages and concepts we’ll cover each week, check out the full curriculum and course description. Or sign up here.
Course Details: When? What? How?
How: We’ll meet on Zoom.
Length: Each session will be about 90 minutes, 60 minutes to go through the passages for the week and 30 minutes for questions.
Time: The sessions will start at 2:00 pm Central Standard Time on Sundays, which is the afternoon for America and evening in Europe. (8:00 pm for you, U. K.)
Dates: The first session will begin on February 13 and continue every other week from there. The dates are: Feb 13, Feb 27, Mar 13, Mar 27, Apr 10, Apr 24.
How Much Does It Cost?
The course costs $50, but is free for paid subscribers of Three Things
So, you have a choice:
Option 1: This Course Only ($50=Course Only)
Use this link (or send it via Venmo to @andymatthewpatton) to pay $50 for this course only.
Option 2: Become A Member ($60=Course+Free Book+Member Perks)
Use this link to become a member for $60/year and get this course thrown in. (Also, we buy all our new members a new, custom-recommended book as a welcome gift.)
How to Endure Inexplicable Suffering
Eric Ortlund on why the book of Job isn’t a letdown
The Old Testament book of Job is the Bible’s magnum opus on the problem of suffering. But for many modern readers, the book is deeply confusing and anticlimactic.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final chapters when God finally speaks to Job. Of all the things God could say, he chooses to end these speeches with a long description of — wait for it — a hippo (behemoth) and a crocodile (leviathan).
At least that’s how many evangelicals read it. Old Testament professor Eric Ortlund is convinced, however, that we’ve got it all wrong. Far more than crocodile, Leviathan is “a spiritual monster”, a “symbol for chaos and evil that is bigger than human beings but not bigger than God.” This insight opens up deeper meanings:
So, when God says, Can you fill Leviathan’s side with spears?, or Get out your spear and kill Behemoth, he’s speaking in an ancient Semitic way to say, Job, I know how much you have suffered. In fact, I see better than you how you’ve suffered. You thought I just clobbered you for no reason because you thought I was a bully. Actually, you’ve been caught up in a war in heaven. I’m the only person who sees the full dimension of your suffering. I tolerate that evil for now, but there is coming a time when I’m going to unsheathe my sword and scour every last bit of evil from my creation. I like to think that we’re going to get a front row seat to see that, as day one of eternity.
These insights are foundational to Ortlund’s acute and sensitive reading of Job in his new book Suffering Wisely and Well: The Grief of Job and the Grace of God. In this interview, Ortlund addresses thorny issues of the sovereignty of God, our permanent ignorance of the meaning of suffering, the danger of being a bad friend, and how the world is hurtling toward God’s final defeat of evil.
Listen to How to Endure Inexplicable Suffering or check out the book over at Crossway. For a more detailed academic treatment of these questions, see Ortlund’s Piercing Leviathan: God's Defeat of Evil in the Book of Job.
The Intimacy of Imbalance
Leah Libresco Sargent invites us into the gift economy
When I (Phillip) first moved to England, it took me a while to learn proper pub etiquette. Sitting down at an American restaurant, everyone in your party orders what they want and then splits the bill up later. At the pub, people frequently take turns buying a round for everyone. In America, we usually settle up exactly. At the pub, there is always some imbalance at the end of the night — and most people are OK with that.
This hints at the difference between a conventional economy of debt-dominated relationships and what Lewis Hyde calls a ‘gift economy’. Leah Libresco Sargent describes it like this:
In a debt-dominated relationship, the goal is to be quits. To be restored to equality is to have no lingering obligations to anyone nor for anyone to have outstanding promises to you. The one who has successfully balanced the books stands alone, untethered. It’s a reasonable approach to take with a merchant, whose relationship to you ends with a purchase, but it makes little sense as a way to relate to your family or your community.
In community, the bonds of need and debt ebb and flow, rarely coming to a conclusion. … [D]ebt sloshes. There is a messiness to it that would be entirely inappropriate for a payroll company or a major bank. But, because everything keeps circulating, the small “errors” of inexactness have a way of working themselves out over the long term. The frequency with which debts, gifts, and favours are exchanged reduces the gravity of any single transaction—it’s the relationship that persists.
Read The Intimacy of Imbalance over at Comment for a Christian invitation to the gift economy. While you’re there, read Michael Rhodes on the divine gift economy set out in — yes — Leviticus.
Learning to Love Your Limits
Kelly Kapic on the good news of our creaturely limitation
Have I done enough? Does God love me? Are the limits of my body bad? Why does physical touch matter so much? How do I find a secure identity?
All of us are riddled by some — or all — of these questions. The answers are hard to come by for many modern Christians, insists theologian Kelly Kapic, because we do not have an adequate understanding of creation. Not, he says, about how God made the earth but about who we are as creatures.
Take ‘Have I done enough?’, a question that saddles many people with guilt that they are being slothful or lazy. In a recent interview, Kapic says:
Often those who struggle with being too busy will describe themselves as slothful or lazy just because they’ve binged Netflix for four or five hours. But I think we’re blaming a symptom rather than the reality underneath it. People are looking at Facebook and endlessly watching Netflix because of a deeper problem: We set unrealistic expectations, and then they wear us out and we can’t keep up.
This is a theological problem, not a time-management problem. What if we stopped thinking of life as to-dos and started thinking of it as relationships? When we’re so task-driven, it’s very hard to appreciate love, because love is incredibly inefficient—and we love efficiency. Making efficiency our highest value is often dehumanizing. We always worry we’re going to make machines like humans, but we’ve also made humans like machines.
Read Learning to Love Your Limits over at Christianity Today, or check out Kapic’s new book You're Only Human: How Your Limits Reflect God's Design and Why That's Good News. Read the first two chapters — ‘Have I Done Enough?’ and ‘Does God Love Me?’ — for free.
Phillip and family made it back to England – and their infant even got in without a visa! They only realised she needed one twenty minutes before leaving for the airport. A long story, but one with some blessed relief at the end. A friend commented that the feeling of relief is a foretaste of heaven. Now, there’s a thought.
Reading: Phillip is nearly finished with Jake Meador’s new book What Are Christians For? Life Together at the End of the World — and it is giving him clarity on a variety of questions old and new. The book is a creative synthesis of Willie James Jennings’ critique of ‘whiteness’ (a word Phillip hates, but the concept seems right) and the theology of Herman Bavinck. We have an excerpt coming to your inbox next week!
Watching and Listening: After speaking about Jacob the patriarch with someone this week, Phillip returned to James Jordan’s summary of Jacob’s life, which is actually a biblical theology of growing up. Hint: Jacob is a good guy, not a deceiver. Brilliant stuff. On the film front, Phillip is looking forward to the MUBI release of Petite Maman next week and to finally watching Joel Coen’s Tragedy of Macbeth sometime in the near future.
Andy is headed up to the Rochester L’Abri conference to speak on deconversion and how modern people shape their identities. You can tell that L’Abri folk really love this conference because even February in Minnesota isn’t enough to keep them away. In years past, Andy has been there through feet of snow at -15° cold. Thankfully, Rochesterians have built miles of commuter tunnels beneath the city (think “windowless shopping mall” more than “prison break") so that conference-goers (and patients at the Mayo Clinic) can get around without going outside.
Reading: After hearing Alan Noble give an amazing lecture at the Nashville Friends of L’Abri meeting, Andy picked up Alan’s book You Are Not Your Own (we published an excerpt a few month s ago).
Other than that, he’s been reading through commentaries on Revelation trying to round out his sense of what the New Jerusalem actually is. Bauckham’s and Beale’s have been super helpful. The commentaries have also helped answer the question of why the New Creation will have a river but no sea (which we’ll be talking about in the upcoming Bible course on water, mountains, and gardens in the Bible).
Darkling Psalter: (Andy’s Psalm commentary, translation, and poetry project) Psalm 46 “The silence between breaths of bellsong.” Psalm 73 “We laughed as wide and as wild as we would.”
Still Point: Andy has continued his writing on deconstruction with Plausibility and Relationships: You Are What Your Friends Believe and Your Beliefs Follow Your Fullness.