I had a big revelation today. I met with a new Israeli friend of mine in the city. We were talking about lots of things and in particular about God.
As my friend was talking about different scriptures, what God was showing Him, speaking to him about, he then started to talk in great detail about the images in the scripture and started to go into great depth about meanings he was perceiving there. I will be honest my thoughts were “wow you are reading a lot/too much into that, you need to look at what the word ‘actually says’, you cannot read so much into the images”. I am really thankful now that I didn’t speak that out but just had those thoughts flash through my mind.
I realise now what great arrogance and pride was driving these thoughts. I have been learning about the Greek model of thinking and how we have so adopted this style of thinking, reason and understanding, and so abandoned the Hebrew way of thinking that instead centres everything around God and what He does or reveals whereas the Greek model centres around us and what we work out. The scriptures use pictures and images a lot. The Lord is like living water, the Lord is your Shepherd. We are supposed to read the bible as images, and get meaning from that we are not supposed to be looking for bullet points and exactly exegete every word and punctuation mark. I believe the Lord highlighted something very important right then, not just about my pride but also about how for centuries we have been missing how we are supposed to be reading the scriptures. The Lord spoke in parables and in word pictures. It is ALL through the scriptures old and new testaments.
Lord forgive me I pray for my arrogance, pride and blindness. We have so much to learn from our Elder brothers the Jews and so much to ask forgiveness for for our still colonialist way of superior prideful thinking.
