Scriptural Lensing
(Transcribed)
A lens, like in a set of binoculars or even our eyeglasses, squeezes whatever you’re looking at into the shape of the lenses. Because our eyesight is poor, or looking through a set of binoculars, when we look at Sandia Crest is going to squeeze it to the field of vision of the binoculars. It lenses what’s out there and turns it into another shape. What is several miles away and at a certain elevation, looks much closer. You have much more clarity when you’re looking through the binoculars than you would otherwise.
There are other kinds of lenses, for instance the famous gravitational lens which allows you to sight a star through your telescope, a star that emits light. The light passes by a large planetary body that has a lot of gravity, and we know that the light will be bent to one side because of the gravitational pull of that celestial body as the light passes by. It angles. The point is that if you look at the star with your telescope, because of the gravitational lensing, the star is not where it appears to be; it’s off to one side.
They made the second atomic bomb that they dropped on Japan using plutonium and they put what they called an explosive lens around it. They put the plutonium at the core of the bomb and then they put conventional explosives all around it, thick at the outer edges, but increasingly thinner toward the center of the bomb. They wanted an uniformity, so that when the bomb exploded, it would work. They called it an explosive lens.
Scripture acts lens-like, in that this lenses squeezes objects into its field. In particular, Scripture lenses language, it affects it. Here’s how I purport to prove this. In the 78th Psalm, this marvelous section where they are told to teach the children in the forthcoming generation, even the ones that were yet unborn.
“Oh my people, hear my teaching, listen to the words of my mouth. I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter hidden things, things from of old, what we’ve heard and know, what our fathers have told us.”
That tells us right off that these people were not there to see these events which they are going to talk to their kids about — “what we have heard.” So they were not there to see the Red Sea open and close, they were not there to see the manna appear on the desert floor, they did not see the water flow from the rock to the tune of millions of gallons of water a day, they didn’t see the quail march in. They’re outside that frame of reference, but they are going to believe it.
That tells us that there are pragmatic events– we use that term to describe concrete circumstances. There was a real moment when ten plagues fell on a country in the Middle East called Egypt and it had “x” effect. There was a day when the Red Sea did open up and the sea-floor bed that would have been many many feet thick with moisture was over a period of hours dried out so thoroughly that an army of millions could walk across it and then it closed in on their Egyptian pursuers. That’s a pragmatic event, it happened.
The word of God, the will of God, the power of God squeezed the material world, it lensed it and shaped it in a different way. It took over the material world and it squeezed it or lensed it into a different shape. That’s why those Egyptian boys ended up dead at the bottom of the Red Sea.
But years passed, the event was over, and it didn’t occur again because it was a one-time event. What they have is the Scriptural references to that pragmatic event. The event is gone, and Asaph by his own admission is dealing not with the pragmatic events with the memory or the abstraction of it– the fact that it was written down. He had Scripture. He says, what we’re going to do is take what we’ve heard and we’ll not hide it from the next generation, but we will tell their children what the latter half of verse 4 says,
“We will tell them the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, His power and the wonders He has done”– the miracles.
We know that an analogy is something built on something else. For instance, a guy might say, “in our company we’re like an anthill.” That’s an analogy. Like the actual thing, there’s a queen ant, that’s the boss, we have all the drones which are us, and we do this and that– we’re busy all the time, just like an anthill.
In the Scripture we have an analogous device. What this analogous device does is talk about that pragmatic event where the will of God and the power of God squeezed or lensed the material world into a certain kind of shape. Here, when you have Scripture, you have a notation of this. But the word of God and the power of God had squeezed the material world, but when you pick up Scripture, what is squeezed is language. It squeezes language into its field, like looking through the field of binoculars, you see the crest which is squeezed into a certain shape by the lenses.
As we look through the lens of Scripture it squeezes what it sees; and what it sees is language. This means, among other things, that we deal with the world we live in and the circumstances that are particular to it–we deal with the world by analogy and not directly.
I would have thought that language itself is a lens. But now I discover that that’s not true–it is something to be lensed. It is something to be squeezed into a different shape. If this is all true, then the Christian doesn’t try to directly lens the material world himself. We don’t try to shape the world of objects– houses, money, obligations. We are not even remotely interested in that. That’s the province of the will of God and the power of God, both of which shape or squeeze the material world. That’s the job, the money, the circumstance we are looking at. We cannot take the world of objects and subject it to the Scriptural lens and squeeze the world of objects because you can’t do that.
You can read the Bible all day long and then turn to the ocean waves and say “Be still,” and it probably won’t happen. Or you can read the Bible where it says in Matthew 6 that God will give us all our needs– and want that job, and it will show up. We’re not trying to shape the material world, we are doing something extraordinary. We want to take the lens of Scripture and squeeze language– but what kind of language? We want to lens language about these things. The Scriptural lens would come to bear on, would squeeze just like a set of binoculars, what it sees. What it sees is language–the language about things.
Here’s an example. I get to feeling bad and I experience a growth and I’m concerned about it. So my friends come to me and say, “what are you going to do about this, Mike?–we are very concerned, we’re afraid you’re going to delay medical intervention too long, it will grow out of control.”
When I go to the doctor, he says, “Yes, all our tests prove that you do have a malignancy of this form and shape and located right here. Here is the general evolution of this kind of growth. It goes through this stage and this one and then you die.”
That’s all language about the world of objects. There are other words associated with that same world of objects. For instance, I would be thinking, “If I die, how will my wife be taken care of? Where would she live and how would she pay a car payment? Is she too old to start a career,” etc. That’s language about those things.
What I saw here is as this began to unfold is that we deal with the world by analogy– I call it an analogical response. Any material circumstance (I use that as a very broad canopy to include everything that we have to deal with, and I make a special class of things I call somatic conditions which have to do with our physiology and our health). Any material circumstance, as far as we’re concerned, we would be interested only in the language about those things, not the things themselves. Because we are not dealing with the world of objects, but we would be dealing with the language about such objects. So if that’s true, here’s what we would have to do:
We would have to prescind (to separate, to cut off and remove) the language about such objects. If we were going to dismantle a sandwich, we would we take the bread off and look at all the parts, we have prescinded it. In the same way, we would prescind language about objects from the objects. In other words, you would be interested in the language about such things as jobs and money and health and just forget the objects. They are not determinative. You have prescinded the language off them. Now what do you do? You bring this language to the Scriptural lens. This lens squeezes this language and reshapes it, reformulates it, and produces something that comes out of it. We could call this lensed language. It has been squeezed into another form.
So I could say something like this: “I prescind the language about my malignancy from the thing itself and I forget the thing itself, because it is not determinative. (Neither is the time associated with it –and part of the language about such objects is, “if you don’t do something about that now, it will soon be too late.”) You would forget that, and you would forget the process that this is supposed to represent (“it will move from this stage to the next stage and after stage 5 you’re dead”). You forget that as non-determinative. You take the language about this malignancy and you bring it to the Scriptural lens so the lens can squeeze it into another shape. It would come out as lensed language.
So I would say something like this. “There was a time when the Red Sea opened and closed; and that means that God has control over the material world. There was a time when the Israelites physiologically were at their most extreme, when they had no water. And God brought water out of the desert. There was a guy who died and was buried in a hole for 4 days and he got up. The Master Himself was buried 3 days and He got up. So what does that mean? It means that God heals, God restores, God resurrects, God can eliminate these things.”
I cannot say certain other things. It changes the language. Supposed we take that lensed language and we slip it over our necks and we walk back over to the object, and we take that lensed language off our necks and we plug it into that object. What happens?
This is the action of faith. If this is all correct, there are five stages here. One, you prescind the language from the object, cutting it off. You have language about the object. We are surrounded by it.
Then you bring the language about the object to this notational lens, the Scriptural lens and let the lens shape it, squeeze it. What is produced is a different kind of language altogether.
Then you take that language in step 3. You walk over and unify it again, plug it into the world of objects.
The fourth stage would be to wait. We would wait of course with expectation because we would expect God to hear us, to respond to our situations.
Five would be vindication.
There are five stages I can clearly see. You could argue and say there’s an earlier stage, because you need to believe the Scripture. That’s true, but I’m trying to get to the meat of the situation.
There’s an analogy between what happened in Israel. That generation of Israelites who actually were at the Red Sea and in the desert, they had a peculiar question. They wanted to know, “will the will of God and the power of God squeeze this material world for our benefit?”
That meant particularly if you are pinned up against the Red Sea– is God’s power and will going to lens material circumstance that surround us and shape them in a different way? They see it happen–the Red Sea does open up, the seafloor that’s many feet thick with mud is blown dry so that many feet can cross it unimpeded. Then on the other side they see it close in and become muddy again as the water flows in on their Egyptian pursuers.
But the problem with them was that they did not use that pragmatic event to squeeze language thereafter. In the 78th psalm, reading in verse 12:
“He did miracles in the sight of their fathers in the land of Egypt and in the region of Zoan. He divided the sea and led them through. He made the waters stand firm like a wall.”
So all the water molecules, against their very nature, stood edge on edge, many feet up, and stayed there. They saw this.
“He guided them with a cloud by day and with a fire all night”
–this is itself a symbol of the Unseen and itself a miracle–
“He split the rocks in the desert and gave them water as abundant as the sea. He brought streams out of a rocky crag and made water flow down like rivers.”
They saw all of that, but it is in the past now. They saw the Red Sea, but they’re going to get to Kadesh Barnea, and when they get there, all those things which were converted into abstractions because once the Red Sea opens and closes, it happens one time but you remember it and it turns into memory, thoughts and ideas and recollections–it turns into abstractions. So from that point of view, those Israelites in the desert at Kadesh Barnea are exactly in the same condition that we are in– we only have the memories and the abstractions of things that are over and done with.
What they didn’t do was to use those memories and those abstractions to squeeze language. That was all they could squeeze–they couldn’t do anything about the inhabitants in the land of Canaan, they couldn’t do anything about the fortifications and the giants, about how much they were outgunned. Here there is an analogous relation.
If you draw a line down the middle of a page and on the left side you write, The word of God and the Power of God lenses the material world. That’s it’s province– you and I can’t do that–at all. Across the line, Scripture lenses language. That’s all it lenses.
Now, we could burn my Bible and we have not affected the Word of God nor His power, because it is beyond that. These things we have been given are used to squeeze language. And those people of the Bible had to deal with linguistic abstractions converted into language. So do we. They are just like us. We are in exactly the same condition. In this sense, only the Scriptural lens can squeeze language.
But we live in a world that doesn’t believe this. People who have read a lot of Shakespeare or history or science or ethics– they would say those things have shaped their language. But only Scripture can truly lens language in the proper way. The worldly language that surrounds us tries to lens the world of objects.
Here is where it finally fell in on me. I have spent a lot of time in the past few years reading books on sciences, especially physics. Of late I have gone into a feverish study of books on mathematics, because I couldn’t figure out how mathematics worked. Here was my problem: We know that we can look at some situations in the material world and we can put a numerical value on it, we can give it a number. Then I can simply walk away from the material world and deal with the interrelations between the numbers. Just the way numbers react among themselves, we say, tells us something and mimics and really copies what is going on in the material world outside us.
It’s an amazing thing. It has always gotten people’s attention, and it works. Because with it we can build jet airplanes that will carry us across the seas safely and comfortably. We can build a refrigerator and an air conditioner and we can transplant organs– all this is done with math. What happens in math is this. We could call it what the world refers to as rational analysis or numeric analysis. (I would put the word rational in quotation marks because they just think it’s rational, and therefore what we do is irrational.)
Here’s what happens– mathematics, often thought of as the basis for rational thinking. People have always believed it. In the last 400 years we have gotten extremely mathematical. But people always did that. “Rational” analysis attempts to lens the world of objects. That’s what we do.
Take Numbers 13 and 14, for instance. The spies go over and come back and they say, “They have walls and giants and there are a lot of them. We can’t win this battle.”
Let me read the case from Deuteronomy 1, which is Moses’ rendition of that event. It captures more of the drama of what’s happening. Let’s start with verse 19.
“Then as the Lord our God commanded us, we set out from Horeb and went toward the hill country of the Amorites, for all that vast and dreadful desert that you have seen; and so we reached Kadesh Barnea.” (The material world is not a figment, it is really out there. And they marched through it.”
“Then I said to you, ‘You have reached the hill country of the Amorites, which the Lord your God is giving us. See, the Lord your God has given you the land. Go up and take possession of it as the Lord, the God of your fathers told you.” (We’re here, unpack, get your swords and go over there and whack those Canaanites. That’s all he said.) Then he states:
“Do not be afraid, do not be discouraged now.” (There’s no way that he’s not referring to language about those objects over there. That’s where you get fear and that’s where you get discouraged. Don’ let language about those objects control you. Get up and go do it.)
“Then all of you came to me and said, ‘Let us send men ahead to spy out the land for us and bring about the route we are to take and the towns we will come to.’ The idea seemed good to me.” (Numbers says he talked to the Lord about it and He said okay.) So they went.
“So I selected twelve of you, one man from each tribe. They left and went up into the hill country, and came to the valley of Eschol, taking with them some of the fruit of the land. They brought it down to us and reported, ‘it is a good land that the Lord our God is giving us.'” (So they come back and they’re showing them all this but very quickly they’re going to use “rational” numerical analysis to try to shape or squeeze the objective world they live in. This is a mistake, it cannot be done.)
“But you were unwilling to go up. You rebelled, you rebelled against the command of the Lord of your God. You grumbled in your tents, saying, ‘The Lord hates us so He brought us out of Egypt to deliver us into the hands of the Amorites to destroy us. Where can we go? Our brothers have made us lose heart. They stay that the people are taller and stronger than we are, the cities are large, the walls are to the sky. We even saw the Anakites there.”
They used their own human analysis, their own human rationality, to try and lens or squeeze or shape to a certain form the objective world. They went back to their tents, depression set in, anxiety set in, discouragement–anxiety worry and fear overtook them. And it was all a matter of language.
If they had done what we’re proposing first, they should have said, “Let us prescind language from the object. Here’s the language about the object. We have always known when we were kids that more of anything is better than less. Bigger is better than small. Every time one guy faced five other kids, he got whipped. The stronger team won the baseball game. Language normally used about this situation is, ‘If we go up with the lack of equipment we have and with the numerical inferiority we have, then a vaster store of matter and energy in motion will beat us.’ Let us prescind that language off and let’s bring that language to the Scriptural lens. What does it say?
It would say that there was a time when God created something out of nothing. There was a time when He brought the Egyptians to death in the Red Sea. We saw what happened at Mara when we got there and there was no water. We complained bitterly, then Moses was shown a stick of wood that he threw in and the water became sweet. The Lord said He had tested us there, telling us we should have prescinded the language– they went three days into the wilderness. That meant they were three days further away from water than they were before. The need for water was much advanced over what it was three days earlier. So things are apparently getting worse not better, so the language about the objects (the desert, their need for water) would have said, “We’re going to die out here.” But you would prescind the language, carry it over to the Word of God, and know that it would tell you something different.
It would change your relationship to the world of objects. Lensing from the worldly point of view, what they did in the desert, it reveals the impossibility of the mission. This is “God gave you a brain, draw a line down the middle of the page and add up the pros and the cons, let’s be realistic about this whole thing.” That would be all wrong– we would say nuts to that! We’re going to use Scriptural lensing to come to bear on the language, knowing that the power of God and the Word of God squeeze the material world on our behalf. They failed this test at Kadesh Barnea, in their tents. What they should have done as I see it, they should have prescinded and then they should have lensed then they should have plugged that new lensed language back into the object and that is going to determine their relationship to the world of objects– and that is the act called faith. The Lord says, “you squeeze language, I’ll squeeze the material world.”
Certainly that was true in the 78th Psalm. In Genesis 22 and even before that, you see it in Romans 4 about how Abraham was called. He is an old man and his wife is somewhat old. And she’s barren, and he has all that language and the language about that kind of world of objects is, “old men my age and old women her age who are biologically incapable of having children do not have children.” Take that language, lop it off the objects, prescind it, bring it to be lensed to the word of God.
The Word says, it really doesn’t matter how old you are or how old your wife is; and it absolutely does not matter that she is biologically incapable of producing children. She will have a son, and you will call him Isaac. Take that language and plug it back into all the world of objects, which is he’s too old, she’s too old, she’s barren.
Remember when the three angels showed up. They were on their way to conduct business with the cities of the plains. When they get there, they announce to Abraham, “by the way, a year from now your wife will bear a child.” He threw himself down on the ground and said, “Oh, if only Ishmael could be the child of promise.” That was language about the world of objects–“she’s too old, she’s barren–don’t you know that?” But the angel said, “nevertheless, a year from now that woman behind the tent and you, unbeliever, you will have a son.” Then they went on to conduct their business with the cities of the plains.
He was using his rational analysis to try to lens the world of objects. That’s where he made his big mistake. In the fourth chapter of Romans, great statements are made about the nature of his faith–in verse 16 it says, “Therefore the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all of Abraham’s offspring,” not only those who are of the law but those who are of the faith of Abraham, including the Gentiles. “He is the father of us all, as it is written, ‘I have made you a father of many nations.’ He is our father in the sight of God in whom he believed.”
What does it mean that he believed in God? In order to believe in God, he had to lop language off, prescind it, from the world of objects, and he had to have that language lensed, reshaped, squeezed, and then he had to walk back and plug it into all that physical objective material reality. That determined how he was going to relate to it.
This was important. “The God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.” That’s quite a statement! Because that’s what He said to Martha, “Do you believe your brother will rise from the dead?” and she would have said, “Well, you know, we have language about that kind of object of death. My brother lingered in illness for a long time, You didn’t show up and things got worse and worse (like the three day journey away from water, it gets worse and worse, and you’re overwhelmed statistically because everything begins to fall apart), and then Lazarus died. Then we lovingly washed his body and prepared it for burial and we put him in that hole over there and behold, he has been there all these four days. Language about such objects tell us that it is impossible to reverse that. But I’ve prescinded my language from this object and I have brought it to You. And I know that there was a point in which You brought something out of nothing and we called it the Creation, there was a day in which you turned the Nile River to blood, there was a day when the Red Sea opened up and closed, there was a day in which the water at Marah was changed from bitter to sweet. There was a day when manna appeared on the desert floor, there was a day when the quail came into the camp of their own free will, there was a day when water by the millions of gallons flowed from the flat rock. There was a time when our people were outnumbered, outgunned, outmanned and outflanked and we put those Canaanites on the run and we drove them out and killed them all. Therefore my language being lensed by Scripture, by Your power, by all that You are and say, then You are going to raise my brother from the dead in the next five minutes. I’m going to take that lensed language and I’m going to walk over to all the objects– the death, deterioration of the synapses and the brain, the cessation of in activity in the bloodstream–I’m going to plug all that language now lensed into this.” And He would have said, “you have faith.”
This is exactly what happened to the centurion, and the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15. They had to cut language off, to prescind it, and it had to be lensed in this way.
He goes on in verse 18 of Romans 4, “Against all hope Abraham in hope believed, and so became the father of many nations, just as it had been said to him, ‘So shall your offspring be.’ Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact” (here’s the world of objects) “that his body was as good as dead, since he was about a hundred years old and Sarah’s womb was also dead.”
There’s language about the world of language. He cut it off, prescinded it, brought it to the Scriptural lens: “Yet he did waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what He had promised, and that’s why it was credited to him as righteousness.”
There’s where the world of God and the power of God all coalesce. So I would say to the Lord, “You squeeze, You lens the material world and I’ll squeeze what You want me to squeeze. I’m going to lens language and I’m going to plug it back into the world of objects. You squeeze what You squeeze and I’ll squeeze what I can.” In the 78th Psalm, the children were to learn that there was a time when the word of God and the power of God lensed the world and gave it another shape. And it was in the shape of the well-being of God’s people. Now, you kids take Scripture– you weren’t there, you didn’t see all this, you weren’t privy personally to the pragmatic events. It’s all abstractions to you. You take these abstractions, you treat them as a lens and bring language to it, language about objects, and you lens the language. Then you take the lensed language and plug it back it– that’s an act I call faith. This is what what I will respect and this is why I will cause things to happen.
This is a “not-quite” cause-to-effect relationship. I say not quite because it’s not exactly a true cause to effect relation. If I take the Scripture and treat it as a lens so that it lenses my language about objects and then I plug it back in, it looks almost causal. But it can’t be causal just because I do that so it’s going to happen over here as if it were some sort of mechanical process. That’s not the way it works. But if I do that, the Lord says, “Okay, I’ll take My will and My power and I will lens the material world on your behalf, and I’ll cause things to happen.” It almost looks like an effect. But it’s not quite. We would be wrong to see it as a legitimate, true iron-clad law of cause of effect. If that were the case I would go to James 5 and say, “Lord, my brother died over here even though we called the elders and prayed. Does it not work?” No, there were other things. If I got really ill like that, the Lord might say to me, “Look, Mikey boy, I have decided that I’m going to take you on to heaven.” That’s His prerogative, and He could make that known to me.
But otherwise, I’m going to lens the language about it, I’m going to forget the tumor, all the objects, deal strictly and uniquely with the language, squeeze the language. If I squeeze the language, God will squeeze the tumor. That’s what it seems to me to say. If I squeeze the language, God squeezes the world of economics, the job market, He lenses it, I don’t. All I do is lens the language. Because He says He likes to see that, it’s what all the great people of faith did, that’s what I expected my people to do generation after generation in the 78th Psalm, that’s what Abraham had to do, that’s what Moses had to do, that’s every Jew was called to do: “You squeeze the language, I will squeeze the material world.” We don’t attempt, then, to lens materiality. That means, keep our hands off it. Don’t finesse it, don’t maneuver it, don’t shape it, don’t massage it.
Remember how Peter drew his sword when they came to arrest Jesus. Then he is sharply rebuked. That tells us two things: we don’t lens materiality, just keep your hands off it. Period. Secondly, we don’t humanly lens the language, with our own intelligence. We let the Scripture do that.
In 2 Corinthians 10 when he talks about these strongholds of thoughts and ideas, I wonder if the stronghold isn’t a humanly-lensed language, or rationally-shaped language. We don’t do that , we are trying to use the Scripture to lens language about the visible and about the invisible. That results in non-natural language about what we see and what we don’t see. If I say, “I’m depending on the reality of the character of God,” the only way I’m going to know anything about the character of God which is in the invisible, is through language that has been lensed. So I can say, “He’s like this.” But that language comes because it has been lensed by Scripture. Psychologists call some things denial by prescinding language from objects, but not lensing it with Scripture.
You might say, “You’re just ignoring it.” That’s an act of irresponsibility, if you’re not submitting it to a Scriptural lens. Why would we read the Scripture, why is important to study representationally? It does no good unless we individually go back and read the Text for ourselves. We learn generalizations and teach them, it helps to lens. Unless a person reads his Bible and learns to lens language for himself, this goes for naught in the long run. Things don’t fundamentally change that should have changed. We read Scripture in order to lens language about objects and about the invisible world.
We have the ongoing argument, nationally. “You know, God loves everybody, including homosexuals. But you mean-spirited Church of Christers, you don’t see that.” There is a case of language about the invisible that has not been lensed. They would have to take such language and lens it through Scripture in order to say, “Yes, God does love the homosexual but He also requires…….”
Suppose a Jehovah’s Witness or a Mormon knocks at the door. We could try to enter into doctrinal debate and get a consensus on certain doctrines from both the JW’s and the Mormons. My thinking is that lensing would far surpass a doctrinal debate. We might say to a homosexual, “You do see after our discussion that homosexuality is a sin.” Suppose the person says, “Yes, I do see that.” So we would have a consensus, and that’s good. But this individual is still probably going to have longings. If it’s a woman we tell her to find a good man, one who won’t mistreat her– and a shudder runs through her. To a man, we’d say to find a good wife. How to handle the longings? I’d say it would be better to learn how to lens language about these things than it is just to admit that it’s a sin. In a way when they say it’s a sin, they’ve admitted up to a point that their language has to be lensed.
If we ask the question, “What is Biblical thinking? What is it to be a spiritual thinker,” I would suspect it that the Biblical references to “knowing” and “understanding” would be to know what the Scripture has called us to do. And relatively simple. We don’t control the world of objects, we weren’t called to do that. The world does, that’s their meat and potatoes. We’re taught to do it in the church, too. That’s what they mean by God gave you a brain and be realistic. That’s why all the urgency, the nervousness, the anxiety and stresses.
A guy comes home from work where he’s been fired. “We don’t like you, you’re fired.” But he might say, “It’s the end of the month, and I have to lay out for my bills.” “We’re not going to give you another dime.” “But all my money’s gone.” So you go back to your wife and five kids. You’d have to say “language about this situation is that we have no money and nothing stored up; we’ve walked three days in the desert, all our water is gone. There is no way to get this money and we have to pay rent, car, and we have to eat. What are we going to do?” As a family, you would say, “Let’s prescind language about the object. Let’s forget the object, it’s not determinative, neither is the time element. This is not a process. Forget it. Take the language, walk over to the Scriptural lens and let that language be squeezed or reshaped.”
Lensed language would say, “Well, there was a time when the people of God were up against a wall. They had no resources, no water, even the water they had wasn’t fit to drink. It was an impossibility, and time was wearing on. They entered into probablistics– thinking, ‘As time goes on, we’re going to die because you can’t live without water and we’re in a whale of a mess because we can’t find it and there’s not enough time to get back. WE will weaken– even the weakest among us are beginning to feel that. But God caused water to flow spontaneously from a rock, God made manna fall on the desert floor, all their needs were taken care of. He promised us in Matthew 6, ‘I’ll give you what you need.’ Therefore it is not inconceivable that I could be fired by noon and hired by 3:00 at a place with a better job and more money. It’s not inconceivable. But if He waits three weeks or three months then you have to wait. In that period of time we are tested mightily, just as the Israelites were. Here’s the Lord who said in Deuteronomy 8 who said, ‘I was the One who led you out into that terrible desert and I led you into places where there wasn’t any water and there wasn’t any food and there wasn’t any hope of survival except for My grace. It was up to Me to either give you water and give you food or let you die. I decided to take you out into that terrible desert to see what you would do. You failed the test.'”
In the same way, we deal with stresses and strains and tests every day. We are under this particular kind of test. Then I thought– I don’t have to deal with the world of objects– they are non determinate. They don’t determine anything– they will be squeezed or lensed by the will of God and the power of God– whatever He wants will happen. I am going to squeeze language while He squeezes the world, and I’ll do what I am supposed to do. That takes all the bite out of the unknowns. I don’t have to know them, or even be assured of them. I just have to squeeze what I have to squeeze. All I can squeeze is the language, and He’ll assure me that He’ll squeeze the material world.
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