The Complete Rob Bell: His Seven Bestselling Books, All in One Place. Rob Bell
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Some translate the phrase “wild and waste.” Each thing God creates and sets in motion is a step, a progression away from the chaos and disorder toward order and harmony. The first things God commands these people to do, then, involve the continuation of this ordering and caring for and the ongoing progression away from chaos.
The universe isn’t finished.
God’s intent in creating these people was for them to continue the work of creating the world, moving it away from chaos and wild and waste and formlessness toward order and harmony and good.17 As human beings, we take part through our actions in the ongoing creation of the world. The question is, What kind of world are we going to make? What kind of world will our energies create? We will take it somewhere. The question is, Where?
Either we’re acting in ways that move the world away from the tohu va vohu or we’re contributing to the chaos and lack of order.
In the creation poem that begins the Bible, people are created after animals. And from the rest of scripture, we learn that people were also created after angels. The order here is significant. The movement in creation is away from tohu va vohu toward greater and greater harmony and order and beauty.
Angels were here before us.
Animals were here before us.
When we act like angels or animals, we’re acting like beings who were created before us. We’re going backward in creation. We’re going the wrong way. We’re headed back toward the chaos and disorder, not away from it.
Our actions, then, aren’t isolated. Nothing involving sex exists independent of and disconnected from everything around it. How we act determines the kind of world we’re creating.
I remember a story in the news about a group of college athletes who hired two dancers to perform at a party they had. The party ended with allegations of rape, and from there the story became about race and power and money and economics and status and all sorts of other things. It was a big mess. But what kept coming up was that these particular athletes had a well-established reputation for being out of control. Their parties were legendary. So their defense, even if it was solid and true, had this cloud over it because of how they were known to behave. And the administration of their school was in the awkward position of wanting to deal with this nightmare but really just wanting the whole thing to go away. But instead they had to keep explaining why they hadn’t done anything in the past to deal with the—let’s call it what it is—animal behavior of their athletes.
And as a result this university was in chaos.
Because God has left the world unfinished. And with every action, we’re continuing the ongoing creation of the world. The question is, What kind of world are we creating?
How we live matters because God made us human.
Which means we aren’t angels. And we aren’t animals.
CHAPTER FOUR Leather, Whips and Fruit
If the Bible were made into a movie, there are lots of parts I wouldn’t watch.
Too graphic, too much detail, excessive violence. You’d think God would have gone for a more family-friendly rating, something Christians could recommend that their friends go see, but instead we have a book crammed full of shocking stories about people doing unbelievably destructive things.
Genocide, polygamy, incest, cutting people up into pieces and mailing the chunks to different parts of the country—and that’s just the first few books. I find one scene in particular almost unreadable. It’s in Second Samuel, a history book that records the reign of King David. One of David’s sons, Amnon, falls in love with his sister Tamar.
And that’s just the first verse of the chapter.
The text says that Amnon became “so obsessed with his sister Tamar that he made himself ill.”1 Amnon’s advisor notices his steadily declining mood, and after hearing of his frustration, the advisor proposes a plan. The plan involves Amnon telling his father, David, that he’s sick and wants Tamar to bring him food.
When Tamar comes in, Amnon orders his servants out of the room and tells Tamar to come to bed with him. She resists, begging him not to harm her. The text reads, “But he refused to listen to her, and since he was stronger than she, he raped her.”
Now we could spend hours discussing the evils of what happens when a man uses his strength to harm, threaten, or coerce a woman. We could reflect on the horrors of abuse and incest, the tragedy that family members are able to inflict on each other.2 The silence of King David. The list goes on.
But notice the next verse: “Then Amnon hated her with intense hatred. In fact, he hated her more than he had loved her.”
What an odd thing for the writer to tell us. The last thing you would expect to hear is how Amnon is feeling, let alone that he feels hatred. We understand her repulsion, but his?
What is it about rape that provokes such disgust in him?
“He hated her more than he had loved her.”
What is it that makes Amnon go from one extreme to the other?
He gets what he wants and it makes him . . . angry? What is it that turns him so fast?
What is it about that line “more than he had loved her” that doesn’t ring true?
It’s lust.
Lust can drive us to do frightening things. It can own us, it can take up massive amounts of head space, and it can make us miserable.
And once in a while, lust may even have something to do with sex.
A Tree with a Long Name
In the beginning, in the opening pages of the Bible, we find God creating all sorts of trees.3 They’re good for food and pleasing to the eye, and God wants them to be enjoyed. God creates this garden and places people in the middle of it because God wants these people to enjoy it. The word God uses for this is “good.” It’s all good from God’s perspective.
But for it truly to be good, it can’t be forced upon these first people. That wouldn’t be good. It has to be their choice. And so there’s a tree in the middle of the garden called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
A bit long for the name of a tree, but the idea is that there is another way for these people to live, outside of how God designed things. And if they eat the fruit of this particular tree, they’ll see what that other way is like, a way separated from the life of God.
And so we have a man and a woman in a garden, eating a piece of fruit. The text puts it like this: “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye . . . she took some and ate it.”4
We’re told that the fruit engages her senses:
she sees
she notices she appreciates she takes she eats
Her sight, her touch, her senses of smell and taste are all involved.
Our senses are incredibly strong.
Maybe it’s her perfume
or the feel of that fabric or how these have a particular shape and form or what it feels like to open a package of those.
Smoking isn’t just about nicotine, is it? It’s about opening a new pack, the feel of the paper, the smell of the cigarette. Fishing isn’t just about fish. It’s about the rocking of the boat and the morning air and what’s in the cooler. Shopping isn’t just about new clothes. It’s about the tags and the fabrics and the sound of the hangers sliding on the rack.
We are sensory creatures.
My