BitterSweetLife

Are God's thoughts like JavaScript?

It’s only to be expected that my words fail me when I try to describe God’s. But the spiritual catalysis unleashed by the meeting of our minds guarantees that I’ll try anyway.

Where to start?

This is worth mentioning: Reading the Bible is more like Shakespeare than Physics. Yes, I’m finding truth—indisputably, this is the point of my reading—but the truth is transformative, begging to be worn and spoken, not dry formula. Yes, the Bible contains principles, but they are for inhabiting, not categorizing. In light of this, the goal is “life translation” of God’s thoughts into my existence—not a larger knowledge base.

Given this fact, I found myself thinking of my Bible-immersion in a slightly ironic way last week. This is like, I thought, reading Java instructions over and over again until I can finally implement the code.

You’ll gather that for me, HTML is shrouded in mystery, which is why, I guess, the analogy works at all. I read the coding instructions again and again until there is a breakthrough in my understanding (very finite) and get it. At last, the script becomes active! Maybe I tweak just one character that I’d mistyped—but the new functions come awake and my page springs to life. “Mere knowledge” has been translated into exciting new ability.

As I read the Bible, I often have the sense that a passage has something profound to say to me if I could somehow get inside it. Or get it inside me—which seems somewhat like swallowing the world. But if I could only apprehend the truth beneath the syntax, it would grow up and overshadow me and I would see more clearly.

Memorizing words God has said is, I think, the best way to really get at their meaning. Why? Not because rote memory “translates” them into my living. But because, having eaten them, I have them available for digestion. Or for “analysis,” in the Java analogy. I haven’t mastered the words yet, but since they are under observation, the cylinders keep firing.

And then something happens. An invisible tumbler clicks into alignment, and life adjusts itself accordingly—I’m one degree nearer to seeing the world as I should. People and thoughts resolve themselves into greater clarity. A glow suffuses the problem that moments ago seemed impenetrable.

Call it life translation. Or call it “inner gold”—leading to a life that rings true.

As David, the warrior-king and poet, wrote: “[Your thoughts] are worth more than the finest gold and are sweeter than honey from a honeycomb. By your teachings, Lord, I am warned; by obeying them, I am greatly rewarded” (Psalm 19:10-11).

Here’s a type of gold that transforms what it touches, flesh and blood included. David, if anyone, embodied God’s thoughts lived out. Life translation, for him, meant valor in battle, mercy in judgment, and mode of living that overawed (and sometimes puzzled) those around him.

David took the aggressive route toward this treasure: he grabbed it. And when he started to grasp God’s thought, he threw his full weight on it, and found that he was walking, running, jumping—fully upright. He had the guts to do what few of us will: shrewdly eye the Bible as a living mystery that would change him if he came too close. Than he deliberately came too close—and was steeped in the life that blazes from God himself—“the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live” (C.S. Lewis).

Caution: The Holy Bible, that leather-bound and slightly musty relic, is wildly flammable if it gets beneath your skin. Get too close—look too hard—and the inner gold may grow you stronger eyes for everyday seeing.

You may find yourself slipping, to your alarm, into true reality.