The Debt
Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good,Titus 2:3 NASB
Teaching– In the ancient world, older people were treasured for their insight and wisdom. After all, they had lived through more than the young. We’ve turned that notion upside down. In modern civilization, social evolution prevails. Its conclusions are simple: Young is better. Young is smarter. Young is more valuable. Just ask any young person.
The Bible, like other ancient works, takes a decidedly different approach. Youth is cursed with arrogant ignorance. Better to have lived to tell about it rather than imagine you will have something to say later. This is particularly true when it comes to trauma. Note these statements:
Each of us is unique and endowed with great potential, but we exist in a kind of waking sleep because of our early childhood programming.[1]
Without conscious effort, we function to a large degree mechanically, according to habitual patterns, as we go about our everyday lives.[2]
Over time, early and necessary (and sometimes life-saving) defensive maneuvers and coping strategies evolve into “patterns” of thinking, feeling, and behaving. These patterns come to operate like “organizing principles,” or beliefs about how the world works and how we must act in order to survive or thrive. These patterned coping strategies turn into invisible and automatic “habits” that influence where your attention goes and what adaptive strategies you employ to interact in the world.[3]
Each of us automatically adopts specific strategies for defending ourselves against threats, and these strategies work together to make up the organizing principles of our personalities.[4]
How long does it take before we begin to recognize the automatic reactive patterns of our lives? How long does it take to actually do something about them? Might I suggest that maturity is a very late stage in life? It doesn’t happen when you can drive, or drink, or vote. It happens after a very long time suffering, struggling, surviving and serving. No one can be an elder in an assembly at the age of thirty-five. Give it a few more decades!
Then there’s the comment by Zornberg:
The grandparent teaches a Torah of r’iyah (seeing), of personal experience, of oscillation, reversals, suspense, insufficiency. Unlike the parent who transmits what has been handed down, generation to generation, the grandparent, across a gap, dares to tell a narrative of danger: how an unmediated vision of great love, the impact of a passion, shook her being into movement, unfurling it into a new language. Ruth’s story makes it possible to reimagine Sinai.[5]
Grandparents are uniquely equipped to translate the biblical text into meaningful transformation. Why? Because they know what it is like to be burned. The rabbis said that a man cannot understand Torah until he has stumbled over it. That takes time. Oh, the stumbling can happen very quickly in life, but it takes a long, long time to realize you have stumbled because of the suitcase you were given at birth. It takes a long time to unpack that bag—and even longer to sort it out. Paradigm blindness is a young man’s disease. To teach what is good I must first have experienced what is bad.
Live long—and change.
Topical Index: elder, grandparent, trauma, teach, Titus 2:3
[1]Beatrice Chestnut, The Complete Enneagram: 27 Paths to Greater Self-Knowledge, p. 2.
[5]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious, p. 379.
I am 67. I remember when I was 16 and I was pontificating about something or other and my grandmother said, “Sherri, you are smarter now than you ever will be.” That’s it. She just said it and dropped it. Wisdom. I was 35, nineteen years and two sons later, when this hit me full force between the eyes and I was mortified when I realized, “Oh, c##p! That wasn’t a compliment!!” It’s a catch 22. The hubris of youth can’t be remedied without the humility of experience. The humility of experience cannot be realized without first being burned by the hubris of youth. Sadly, way too many youth never end up r’iyah(seeing) the value of growing up and continue to embrace immaturity and even celebrate it. My grandma passed away over 20 years ago and I desperately miss her wit and ability to provoke investigation. Wisdom. So now, I must continue to ask myself – and others: where am I still stuck, lacking the wisdom and determination to unpack that which will burn off the dross?
When you redeem something, you purchase it for a price and it is yours. Debt is incurred when you get something and haven’t paid for it yet. So, Messiah got me out of debt, but didn’t redeem me? I am trying to understand. Help.
Sheri, you’ve experienced the apostle Paul’s “gotcha” moment. He was exposing the Gentile world to the profound (Jewish) story of “messiah”, but even more…he had been given revelation of his own unique calling to those of the Greek culture and paradigm. (Most of us have a history with that same type of paradigm.) Now that God has our attention, he desires to show us the fullness of a different way of ‘seeing’…his way.
Sheri,
I’m with you on this! In the 2nd part to the previous TW, Skip referenced the word λύτρον (lytron), which is used in the LXX in reference to atonement. This is the noun form of the word. The verb form, lytroō, is used in both Titus and 1 Peter, both in reference to Christ. Here they are in the NASB:
The first is from Titus 2:14:
The second is 1 Peter 1:18:
The other word Skip referenced that was used in the LXX for atonement is ιλαστήριον (hilastērion), also the noun form. This word is used for the mercy seat of the Ark of the Covenant in Heb 9:5, but for Christ in Rom 3:25. Another noun form, hilasmos, is used twice of Christ in John’s first epistle:
The verb form is hilaskomai (“merciful”, “propitious”), and it is found in Luke 18:13, in reference to the tax collector. It is also used of Yeshua in Heb 2:17:
Paul’s use of exagorázō in Galatians is merely another way to express Christ’s redeeming work. This term is not used exclusively in this vein, however, as it also used in Eph 5:16 and Col 4:5, meaning “to redeem time”.
Yes…and now look at the ideas of redemption in the “Old Testament” and the connections made there in the “Moses/Sinai culture”. How do those ideas represent the truth in its fullness? The same ‘truth’ that stood before Pilate in ‘fullness’. The continuity is there, if our way of ‘seeing’ it is freed from the confinements that narrow the perspective of our field of view.
Sherri, another quick point…your description of what it is to “redeem something” reflects a view of redemption that is often assumed and frequently presented, but is inaccurate. Biblical redemption is far more sweeping (and yet nuanced) than that involving (in various cases) the “firstborn”, the rights/prerogatives of God as sovereign, near kinsman/relative, honor/shame, avenger of blood, etc. It is a concept far more complex than the transaction you described, which is a simple “purchase”. (I think that’s one what Skip was attempting to help us recognize through his two previous TW postings.) And yes, I initially had the same response to those posts.
Got you out of DEBT through HIS redemptive shed blood you’ve been redeemed HE owns you if your HIS we are HIS Servants to obey HIM HIS laws statues commands and judgements ?
I have been tangling with a couple of precious people in my life who are enamored with occult teaching. The occult relies on human psychology: namely the hardwiring that ‘fates’ us with our programming – our past. In the flesh, it is true that we do as we are done by. No matter how hard we try to overcome our past, it inexorably shapes our present and our future because our parents ate from that Tree of Experience. Our coping strategies and our paradigms are built out of our experience, which most of us (as one of those coping strategies) try desperately to avoid having to admit because then we would have to face the fear, guilt and shame that past comes packaged in. Occult teaching seemingly circumvents those negative emotions and associations we are saddled with by assuring us that, essentially, we will be fine as soon as we figure out that it is our CONSCIENCE that is our problem. Ditch the conscience, and bliss will ensue. This is the essence of the one ‘commandment’ of the Church of Satan: a version of the Nike swoop: “just do it”. So we see teachings like “The Law of Attraction”, and “follow your joy”, and the like. If it feels good, just do it. This is so subtle and seems so ‘right’! No repentance necessary!
I am struggling to find the ways to stay in relationship with these precious people in my life while pointing out the fatal flaws in this philosophy: the main one being that if people just do what makes them happy, they are doomed to do whatever coping strategies to deal with their past they come burdened with because we are all doomed by experience to do as we were done by. That’s great for someone who was loved perfectly as a child but to someone who was abused they are doomed to repeat the abuse as their version of ‘feeling better’: that’s the only relief their programming ‘allows’. As a side note, abused people are attracted to the occult, I have noticed. I have yet to meet someone in it that was not abused. Everyone is looking for a way out of the trap of their experience, I believe.
I know that I, as a young parent was, for the most part, still stuck in my programming, and in that state, I had my children and subsequently passed that programming down to them. I think grandparents have had time to see their problems passed down to their children and grandchildren and so have the perspective to repent and reform. I believe there is nothing as charming as the humility of heaven. “I was wrong” is an automatic attention-grabbing headline. Everyone will drop what they are doing to hear whatever gets said next!
This post feels as if it is about me and for me. All my life, older women reached out to me and taught me. A few of them are still around, but most are gone, and I miss them. But what they did for me gave me the awareness that I must repay the kindness I received, plus interest, to the youngsters I encounter. I am grateful to be able to do that, teaching a handful of young girls in our local youth group, and less formally, my own grandchildren, the wisdom which was imparted to me, and also, what I have learned from those like Skip, who have pulled back the curtain that was concealing a more complete understanding of our faith, and knowledge of our Creator. Praise the LORD!
The Debt. May 17th. 2019
I really don’t think it used to be like this. It is the way you describe it now. It shouldn’t be this way. We have been deceived. We have been manipulated and brainwashed. Worse than that. We have been affected in a way that we aren’t able to understand. I am hopeful that it will change again back to the way it was as people are waking up to to the truth.
If we are going to get into the forensics of redemption, I think we have to differentiate between our point of view and God’s point of view, but also between what happens on our end vs. what happens on His end. We also have to consider what redemption does for us as not being quite the same as what it may ‘do’ ‘for’ Him. Finally, I think it is important to realize that what God does He does regardless of what we think He is doing/done, or think He OUGHT to be doing, or even believe what He is doing/done. After all, the sun still comes ‘up’ in the sky whether or not we think we are the center of the universe or are spinning on an axis (who knows: there are some credible astronomers who think it is possible that it may be both).
From my end, redemption has been accomplishing a gradual shift in motivations from fear/guilt/shame/lust/self pity/bitterness/despair/self focus of all sorts to the freedom to love my way through my day instead (halleluah!). I know to the bottom of my heart that I am “accepted in the Beloved”: that my life is no longer hinged on ME – my efforts, my understanding or my mistakes, even – I can rest in my Saviour. Honestly, I don’t exactly know HOW that is: I only know that now all I need is to keep showing up at God’s cross(road) when the Sun of righteousness is shining and trade in (repent) my junk motivations for His right motivations (His will) to power my day. All I know is that I went from can’t to can in a big way!
How did God fix all the cracks between me and life again – all the fractures in reality in my world, whether initiated by me or by others? I don’t know! The Bible says that “life is in the blood”, and that His blood somehow fixed my problem and somehow reconnected my cracks with reality, and re-powered me – hooked me back up with all the right connections (by means of His righteousness, or connections, instead of my poor ones) – so that my choices work again. Honestly, I don’t know what that may look like on His end: what He really had to do to accomplish all that. If the people who wrote the Bible were inspired to say words, I am going to trust those words to mean something real, but I know that that reality is true regardless of what my poor brain can or can’t wrap itself around; my redemption being chief. And that’s ok by me! Halleluah!