The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place. Rob Bell
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about how church should be. It’s another thing to be the thirty-year-old pastor of a massive church.
And that is why I was sitting there in the closet thinking about how far I could be by 11 A.M. The next service was starting, I had just finished the 9:00 service, and I was done. I escaped to the storage closet where I could be alone and collect myself and figure out what to do next.
I was moments away from leaving the whole thing.
I just couldn’t do it anymore.
People were asking me to write articles and books on how to grow a progressive young church, and I wasn’t even sure I was a Christian anymore.
I didn’t even know if I wanted to be a Christian anymore.
What do you do when you can hear the room filling up with thousands of people who are expecting you to give them words from God, and you don’t even know if it is true anymore?
I was exhausted.
I was burned out.
I was full of doubt.
I was done.
I had nothing more to say.
And so I sat there with my keys in my hand, turning them over and over, listening to them clink against each other, hearing the room getting louder and louder and more and more full.
And it was at that moment that I made some decisions.
Because without pain, we don’t change, do we?
I could talk about the dangers of megachurches and life in the spotlight. I could write pages about what is wrong with Church Incorporated and the flaws of institutional Christianity, but I realized that day that things were wrong with the whole way I was living my life.
And if I didn’t change, I was not going to make it.
It was in that abyss that I broke and got help . . . because it’s only when you hit bottom and are desperate enough that things start to get better. This breakdown, of course, left me with all sorts of difficult decisions to make about Mars Hill. The church was alive and people were being transformed and the stories never stopped coming. Who would leave all that? I decided to be honest about my journey, and if people wanted to come along, great. But I was still going to have to go. And a new journey began, one that has been very, very painful.
And very, very freeing.
It was during this period that I learned that I have a soul.
Shalom
The tzitzit (seet-see) first appear in Numbers 15 when God says to Moses, “Throughout the generations to come you are to make tassels on the corners of your garments, with a blue cord on each tassel. You will have these tassels to look at and so you will remember all the commands of the Lord, that you may obey them and not prostitute yourselves by chasing after the lusts of your own hearts and eyes. Then you will remember to obey all my commands.”1
God tells his people to attach tassels to the corners of their garments so they will be constantly visually reminded to live as he created them to live.
The word in Hebrew here for “corners” is kanaf.
The word for “tassel” (or “fringe”) is tzitzit.
To this day, many Jews wear a prayer shawl to obey this text. The prayer shawl is also in a lot of interesting places throughout the Bible.2 One of the most significant is in the prophet Malachi’s prediction about the coming Messiah: “The sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings.”3
The word Malachi uses for wings is kanaf—the same word in Numbers that refers to the edge of a garment, to which the tassels were attached. So a legend grew that when the Messiah came, there would be special healing powers in his kanaf, in the tassels of his prayer shawl.
Fast-forward to the time of Jesus: A woman has had an illness for twelve years and no one can cure her.4 She pushes her way through a crowd to get to Jesus, and when she gets close to him, she grabs his cloak. Now remember, Jesus is a Torah-observant Jewish rabbi who keeps the scripture commandments word for word, including passages like Numbers 15, which means Jesus would have been wearing a prayer shawl. So when the woman grabs the edge of his cloak, she is demonstrating that she believes Jesus is the Messiah and that his tassels have healing powers. She believes that Jesus is who Malachi was talking about.
If you were in the crowd, what would you think about this woman? This woman believes that this man is the Messiah.
She touches his tassels and is healed, just like Malachi said.
But I don’t think the physical healing is Jesus’s point here. I think it is what Jesus says to her as they part ways.
He says to her, “Go in peace.”
The word Jesus would have used for peace is the Hebrew word shalom. Shalom is an important word in the Bible, and it is not completely accurate to translate it simply as “peace.”
For many of us, we understand peace to be the absence of conflict. We talk about peace in the home or in the world or giving peace a chance. But the Hebraic understanding of shalom is far more than just the absence of conflict or strife.
Shalom is the presence of the goodness of God. It’s the presence of wholeness, completeness.
So when Jesus tells the woman to go in peace, he is placing the blessing of God on all of her. Not just her physical body. He is blessing her with God’s presence on her entire being. And this is because for Jesus, salvation is holistic in nature. For Jesus, being saved or reconciled to God involves far more than just the saving of your physical body or your soul—it involves all of you.
God’s desire is for us to live in harmony with him—body, soul, spirit, mind, emotions—every inch of our being.
Restoration
To say that salvation is holistic is to acknowledge that there are many dimensions to living in harmony with God. In one sense, salvation is a legal transaction. Humans are guilty because of our sin, and God is the judge who has to deal with our sin because he is holy and any act of sin goes against his core nature. He has to deal with it. Enter Jesus, who dies on the cross in our place. Jesus gets what we deserve; we get what Jesus deserved.
For Jesus, however, salvation is far more. It includes this understanding, but it is far more comprehensive—it is a way of life. To be saved or redeemed or set free is to enter into a totally new way of living in harmony with God. The rabbis called harmony with God olam haba, which translates “life in the world to come.” Salvation is living more and more in harmony with God, a process that will go on forever.
When we understand salvation from a legal-transaction perspective, then the point of the cross becomes what it has done for us. There is the once-and-for-all work of Jesus dying on the cross for our sins and saying, “It is finished.” Nothing more to be offered and nothing more to be sacrificed. Jesus’s death perfectly satisfies God. We claim this truth as Christians. All has been forgiven. But let’s also use a slightly different phrase: the work of the cross in us. There is Jesus’s death on our behalf once and for all, but there is the ongoing work of the cross in our hearts and minds and souls and lives. There is the ongoing need to return to the cross to be reminded of our brokenness and dependence on God. There is the healing we need from the cross every single day.5
Which leads to forgiveness. The point of the cross isn’t forgiveness. Forgiveness leads to something much bigger: restoration. God isn’t just interested in the covering over of our sins; God wants to make us into the people we were originally created to be. It is not just the removal of what’s being held against us; it is God pulling