You Thought I Was Just Like You

by Katherine Carberry

I flipped through the pages of my journaling Bible this morning, turning to the Psalm of the day. According to my Bible reading plan, I was scheduled to read Psalm 50. As I settled in and began to read, right away I could see that it was a serious and majestic description of God and his righteous judgment. When I got to the words of God to the wicked in verses 16-21, I began to feel shivers: “‘What right do you have to recite my statutes and to take my covenant on your lips? You hate instruction and fling my words behind you. When you see a thief, you make friends with him, and you associate with adulterers. You unleash your mouth for evil and harness your tongue for deceit. You sit, maligning your brother, slandering your mother’s son. You have done these things, and I kept silent; you thought I was just like you. But I will rebuke you and lay out the case before you.’” (CSB)

Reading this stirred up grief in me. I have watched the devastation that results when the instructions of the Lord are flung behind shoulders—in my own heart, home, family, church, and beyond. And sadly, when we fling away his words, we often are still using the words of God upon our lips in order to affirm our own rejection of his other instructions. And then the right words of God in the Psalm continue on to say, “you thought I was just like you.”  This is where I stopped and saw that this is the awful way all of us bend. To excuse and explain our behavior with Christian-sounding words and prepared verses, all the while pressing God into our own image, trying to fit him into our own plans rather than bowing low and allowing him to ever widen our view of him—to let him wonderfully change us. And I would like to present the simple idea that this is why we need the entire Scriptures, the entire church, and the entire fullness of the Holy Spirit.

It may sound overly simple, but that is because it’s utterly foundational. And without a firm foundation, we will not endure when the day of evil comes.

We Need the Bible – All of It

It can be so easy to skip hard passages or skim over those long Old Testament books that are full of lists, genealogies, or rules. But for others, it can be just as easy to rigidly tie themselves to things like Bible-in-a-year plans or time-blocked devotions as a good work, something we can point to and pat ourselves on the back about because we actually do read our whole Bibles. (We must be such good Christians!)

But it is so much broader and deeper than that. And yes, if you haven’t guessed, I would fall under that second category. I love checklists and following instructions, and it feels good to accomplish reading the entire Bible every year and keep myself on track. But the actual thing that sustains us is the Word of God, never our own accomplishments or obedience. We need to get the pure words of Scripture deep into our bones and allow it to transform us. So whether we read multiple chapters a day, a few verses in our spare moments, or listen to passages being read aloud on an app in the car, it is worth it. There is deep nourishment to be found wherever the streams of Scripture are flowing. If it lies forgotten or neglected for a time, all we have to do is go right back to it and drink deep again.

The Bible is where God has come down low in grace and spoken to us. He has breathed it out for us, sufficient and complete. (2 Timothy 3:16-17) It is possible to read your entire Bible a hundred times and never truly love the God revealed there. But if even the smallest desire is there—to know God a little bit better, to find out what he is like, to wrestle with your deepest questions and doubts—then open the pages of Scripture. You’ll soon find that God tells us there to keep his words close, (Psalm 119) to eat them as bread, (Jeremiah 15:16, Matthew 4:4) to depend upon them for our very lives (Deuteronomy 32:47). Part of his good instructions are to know and love his good instructions. There is certainly a good reason for this. Jesus himself perfectly loved and relied upon the Scriptures to sustain him during his earthly life and ministry. He is our main example, he is our wisdom from God. We may be weak, but he is able and gentle to help us.

One thing that we can easily forget as we read the books in the Bible, spread across multiple ages, genres, and voices, is the fact that the Bible is indeed telling one whole story. Every part of it serves a purpose in directing us to Jesus Christ himself and his work of redeeming all things. No part of the Bible is useless or void of significance, even for us today—even the oldest and most difficult parts to read. There is always more to behold, always more of Christ to discover in every page. 

And, amazingly, the Bible is written in such a clear way that we are able to interpret it with the help of the rest of the Bible. Many of our Bibles are equipped with cross-references that can greatly enrich personal reading, and illuminate those passages that can be hard to understand.

Additionally, we need the insights of others who are also spending their days close to Scripture. We of course need to be regularly hearing the Word of God preached by able ministers. But I’m also talking about the work of Bible reading and study being done within a community. All of us have blind spots and false assumptions that can be stubborn to uproot. But with a teachable spirit, we ought to gather together and study with other Christians who are each on a different part of their journey of knowing God as revealed in the Bible. We need conversations about what we are reading. We need the freshness of each other’s interpretations and questions to help us continually unfog our eyes and see the truth more clearly. Which leads me to my second point.

We Need the Church – All of It

There is not a member of the church of Christ that is not needed. All of us have been given multicolored gifts and varied amounts of faith. The body does not flourish when any member of it is sitting on their gifts, not offering them in love to the rest of the body. That’s why we grieve when a member abuses their gifts or position and our fellowship is broken. We mourn when we realize another member is burning out because others have not helped to shoulder the weight or honored her for her years of quiet, generous serving. We limp when we do not have the honest, transparent relationships that we all need, or the strong protection and gentle shepherding that God requires of the leaders and teachers of his beloved children. 

In the women’s Bible study I attend, we have been discussing 1 John, particularly what it looks like to walk in the light. John’s clear longing for his readers to be in fellowship with one another and to abide in Christ instructed me on how we should be longing for others to join  the fellowship that we share with the triune God. We cannot walk in the light very well if we feel alone and cannot see our brothers walking in the light beside us. (1 John 1:7) How it helps us on our own way when we get to see the members of the church confessing their sin, living transparently, holding fast to the Word and keeping her doctrine pure, and walking in obedience to the Lord whatever the cost. We help one another on the way that Christ took – the way that we follow. (1 John 2:6) Our Christian life and growth in grace needs a community of grace in order to flourish. 

Let’s aim to make one another’s joy complete, as the apostle John also urged upon his readers, and as Christ himself taught. Let us be a joy to teach, a joy to shepherd (Hebrews 13:17), a joy to learn from, a joy to serve. Let it be us who answer midnight calls with joy, who run toward the hurting for the joy of easing burdens, who labor in prayer with great joy. Let us remind one another of who we are and to whom we belong, lest we forget and think that God is just like us. 

We Need the Holy Spirit—and We Have All of Him

My pastor reminded his listeners in the sermon on Sunday night that we are running headlong toward death, if not for the illuminating, lifegiving Holy Spirit. He was finishing up his sermon series through the book of Acts, and Paul’s description at the end of people without the Spirit is quite vivid. Quoting Isaiah, he writes, “You will always be listening, but never understanding; and you will always be looking, but never perceiving. For the hearts of these people have grown callous, their ears are hard of hearing, and they have shut their eyes.” (Acts 28:26-27, CSB)

It is true life to have the Spirit’s eternal presence upon and within us, as our helper forever. Any one who has Christ has him in fullness through his own sent Spirit. We have all of him, all of the time. Even if we don’t feel it, or we forget he’s there, or our “faith burns low, [and our] hope burns low” as an old hymn says. The Spirit shows us Christ, gives him to us, lifts our lagging belief, and stirs those low fires to a bigger flame.

We keep on needing the Holy Spirit’s transforming work as we continue on our soul’s best work—learning Christ. The deeper we go, the better we see the God who is not like us, but also the beauty of his Son who came to dwell with us. He did not leave us so far away, he came near, he did become like us in a way we did not expect, made atonement for us on the cross, and will continue shaping us into his own likeness, through the Holy Spirit. We, who have tried to break God down to look like us, have now been given this mercy. 

Let us gladly take hold of the whole Scriptures, the whole Church, and the whole Christ, for our whole life depends upon it.