Dear Fellow Recent Graduates, or How to Adult

“Even in this world of course it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.”

C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (1953)

 

They definitely should not have let this kid graduate. He is totally not ready to start adulting. Thanks to sattva at freedigitialphotos.net.

Dear Fellow Recent Graduates,

Well, look at that! We made it! Actually graduating was, in the end, a rather anticlimactic moment, don’t you think? All that poring over books and furiously scribbling lecture notes and staring at blank screens desperately trying to arrange raw brain matter into something resembling a coherent argument as the deadline ticks nearer, and its culmination is the opportunity to don a silly hat and walk across a stage. All credit to my university’s Chancellor; he must have shaken hundreds of other graduands’ hands before mine, and yet he managed not only to avoid giving off an impression of being thoroughly entombed in tedium, but even to look genuinely pleased with me for my achievement as he congratulated me on having finished my degree. And nobody tripped over, either, so I suppose we can call the ceremony a success.

And now, friends, we enter the brave new world of Actual Adulthood.

Cue groans, gasps, grimaces, and perhaps an occasional bursting into tears or hiding under the nearest table.¹ Isn’t it simply loathsome, this idea of adulthood? Taking responsibility for one’s actions, having some level of competence demanded of one, making one’s own decisions – goodness gracious, could there be anything more detestable?

You may, bristling at my sarcastic tone, protest something to the effect of, “But I don’t know how to adult!” Your textbook example of the linguistic phenomenon known – rather pleasingly, in my opinion – as ‘verbing’,² articulates a familiar complaint. I’ve lost count of the occasions over the last few years when peers of mine have expressed a feeling of severe inadequacy to properly conduct themselves as fully-grown, of-age human beings. They have, they bemoan, a woefully insufficient understanding of the ins and outs of managing an income, a career, a home. Actual Adults prove their Actual Adulthood by knowing all about how to pay a bill, defrost a freezer, vote, uncork a bottle of wine, fill in a tax form, maintain a garden, decide on an outfit for an event pitched as smart-casual, and so forth. We studenty types, by contrast, are poor incompetent fools not ready for the big bad world of dealing with such responsibilities. In fact, I’m pretty sure I used to express some of the same sentiments myself, until it hit me that Actual Adults don’t know exactly what they’re doing either.

Contrary to what we may wish, my friends, there is no magic moment at which a knowledge of how to adult miraculously plants itself in a human brain. Just as shaking hands with the Chancellor and receiving a pretty certificate earlier this week didn’t immediately fit me for full participation in all aspects of the adult world, neither will any milestone so fit any of us, be it marriage, childbirth, home ownership, whatever. The way people figure out how to adult is through the practice of adulting. I think a lot of us have it in our heads that it’s somehow shameful to ask our parents how to do things like pay bills and defrost freezers and so on, that having to ask is merely proof of our dreadful, childish incompetence – but you can bet that the very parents we’re ashamed to ask (even though we always do) probably asked their own parents for the same information however many years ago, that that’s how they learned to do the thing in question. And then they practised, and over the years got better at it. Indeed, we these days are even better placed than our forebears for discovering basic principles of adulting: we have that whole repository of collective wisdom that we call the Internet at our fingertips.

“What, Google? But that’s cheating.” Is it? “An Actual Adult wouldn’t have to use Google. He or she would know without Googling.” Well, tell you what, Google the thing just the once, and then you’ll know how to do it, won’t have to Google it again, and, hey presto, will have attained to Actual Adulthood, in that particular sphere at least. After all, we’re only just starting out as adults. We can’t expect to be absolute pros just yet. We should be willing to receive knowledge from whatever sources it is forthcoming, instead of vainly yearning for our minds to spontaneously generate it.

It seems pretty evident that our real problem isn’t that we have no opportunity to learn to adult, but rather that we just don’t really want to try. Adulting is scary, and the fact is that we’ve found ourselves pretty well able to get away with not adulting for a very long time indeed. Almost every previous era of humanity, if not every (I can’t think of any exceptions off the top of my head, but that doesn’t prove there haven’t been any) would have had a good number, most likely a majority, of us married with children by now, and most of us would probably have been working for a living for years. But as life expectancy has skyrocketed, so has the plausible length of life’s childhood component. And so here we all are fooling around, dragging our feet, complaining at having to do what, if we’d had the misfortune to be born at an earlier stage of history, we’d probably have been forced to do a good while ago –doing away with childish things³ and taking up the mantle of the Actual Adult.⁴

My point is not, just to be clear, that anyone who has yet to tick off two or three life milestones of the marriage/childbirth/home ownership type is clearly Failing at Life; that would be rather hypocritical of me, to say the least. Nor is it that the world was a better place when child labour and child marriage were the norm.⁵ My point is that we should bite the bullet and come to terms with reality: we, my friends, already are actual adults, and we’ll get more out of being such if we start behaving like it, rather than shirking all major responsibility as we cling to the vestiges of a childhood we’ve frankly been privileged to have hung on to for this long.

It’s not as if being an adult is a particularly lame gig or anything. For one thing, childishness doesn’t have to go totally out of the window, as is evident enough from every time you’ve ever seen an adult playing with a small child, among other things – a marker, I think, of true maturity is the ability to gauge when childishness is appropriate (as per my opening quote) – but we get to ditch those annoying aspects like how horrible children can be to one another because they simply haven’t developed a social filter, and how excruciatingly much everything matters when you’re a child.⁶ On top of that, the benefits of adulthood are startling: we can manage our own lives now, set our own rules based on our own values. Certain factors, admittedly, will always be outside our control, but even though we can’t dictate, say, how much we earn, or who our boss is, it’s entirely up to us what we do with that money, and whether we want to continue working for that boss or would rather look for other opportunities elsewhere.

“Well, that’s all very well for you to say. You’re going to swan around as a perpetual student for the next four years. Most of us are confronted with rather less luck and certainty than that when we graduate, you know.” Granted. I’ll hold my hands up to the fact that I have been extremely fortunate indeed, quite extraordinarily so, in securing the opportunities I have – but I’m not trying to have a go at you from atop some imagined moral high ground; I just genuinely believe you’ll have a nicer time as an Actual Adult if you take the decision to admit that you are one and get on with learning how to perform adult-esque tasks as they are demanded of you, rather than hanging around in an odd sort of post-adolescent limbo because you don’t feel prepared for Actual Adulthood.

In short, we’ll never learn to adult unless we start actually trying. Want to know how to pay a bill? Ask your parents! Want to know how to defrost a freezer? Google it! Intentionally pursue the enviable status of Actual Adulthood that you imagine others to have achieved, rather than waiting for it to spontaneously befall you. Much as we’re human, and the making of mistakes comes with the job, there are, as any Actual Adult knows, many, many worse things out there than the following of an incorrect procedure for the defrosting of a freezer.

Friends, I really do wish you the absolute best in all your future endeavours. Happy adulting!

Yours sincerely,

Your Fellow Recent Graduate

Footnotes

¹ OK, so I’ve never actually encountered either of those last two reactions upon mentioning someone’s impending Actual Adulthood to him or her, but I sometimes think they’re not completely beyond the realms of possibility.

² The best thing about verbing is that the term is a result of itself: the noun ‘verb’ was verbed to create the verb ‘verb’, whence the gerund ‘verbing’. A fuller discussion of the use of verbing may be found here: http://grammar.about.com/od/grammarfaq/f/verbingfaq.htm.

³ I here allude to 1 Corinthians 13: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+13&version=NASB. (I’ve given you the NASB just because I preferred its phrasing of the particular few words I referenced; feel free to switch translations to something a bit less clunky.) It would be improper of me to use the section in question to back up the point of this post, because Paul is using the difference between childhood and adulthood as a metaphor for the difference between our current existence and the glorious existence to come, but it’s still a great chapter.

⁴ See also Just Do Something by Kevin DeYoung, which I talked about a bit last month in ‘Life in Tutorial Mode’ (box on the right-hand side if you fancy a look). Mr DeYoung argues that our generation are defined by being ‘tinkerers’, toying with this and that but unwilling to step up, take responsibility, and commit to something. I once again take the opportunity to highly recommend this book to any of you with decisions to make; 10ofthose, as usual, would seem to have the most competitive pricing one can get without lining the pockets of Amazon: https://www.10ofthose.com/products/642/Just-Do-Something.

⁵ As is still the case in some places: http://www.girlsnotbrides.org/.

⁶ Probably my favourite portrayal of this latter quality comes in the 1991 Studio Ghibli film Only Yesterday, recently re-released in an English-dubbed version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0ZrjocXVJ4. It’s a slow burn, granted, but a very beautiful one.

Myers-Briggs and Morality

“Well, it wasn’t easy, but, by following my feelings, I wound up doing the right thing. I guess I learned that my duty is to my heart.”

Mulan 2 (2004)

 

The ethical implications of keeping a human brain in a light bulb are not something this post is concerned with; I just liked the picture.

This post heavily concerns the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), of which you may or may not have heard; if the latter is true, you might like to read up a bit about it and do a quiz or two to discover your own Myers-Briggs personality type before reading further.¹ Then again, I don’t like to give my charming readers too much homework aside from hefty portions of scripture, so here’s a quick introduction to the test that should provide a portrait of it sufficient to enable an understanding of what I’m on about in this post:

The MBTI was developed by Isabel Briggs Myers, and her mother, Katharine Briggs, based on a theory of psychological types described by Carl Jung. The theory essentially boils down to the idea that differences in behaviour between individuals can be explained by differences in the way they prefer to use their perception (becoming aware of things) and judgement (coming to conclusions about what has been perceived). Four areas of such preference are concerned:

Favourite world: Do you prefer to focus on the outer world or on your own inner world? This is called Extraversion (E) or Introversion (I).

Information: Do you prefer to focus on the basic information you take in or do you prefer to interpret and add meaning? This is called Sensing (S) or Intuition (N).

Decisions: When making decisions, do you prefer to first look at logic and consistency or first look at the people and special circumstances? This is called Thinking (T) or Feeling (F).

Structure: In dealing with the outside world, do you prefer to get things decided or do you prefer to stay open to new information and options? This is called Judging (J) or Perceiving (P).²

Choose the letter that represents your preference in each area, put them together in the given order, and hey presto, that’s your Myers-Briggs personality type. There are sixteen possibilities in all. Mine is ISTJ, aka the ‘Logistician’, the ‘Duty-Fulfiller’, the ‘Examiner’, or, more cynically, the boring one. It’s apparently the most common, and it’s all on the left side of the brain,³ very logical and methodical and pragmatic. Online quizzes tend to tell me I’ll most likely do well as a surgeon or an engineer – no thank you.⁴ Used properly, though, the MBTI doesn’t attempt to shoehorn and confine people into rigid, stereotyped boxes: every factor is a spectrum rather than an outright dichotomy, and so not every ISTJ is expected to be exactly the same kind of person. Rather, each personality type represents a variety of individuals who display broad similarities in the way they are naturally inclined to interact with people and information.

I think knowing one’s Myers-Briggs type can be enormously helpful in terms of emotional intelligence (which, I was assured at one of those largely useless compulsory careers events my university likes to put on, is ‘the new competence’) – by which I mean that, true to the behaviour-explaining purpose of Jung’s original theory, knowing that I’m ISTJ gives me an improved awareness of why I do the things I do. For instance, I really dislike being left in charge of something without clear and thorough instructions as to what I’m supposed to be doing. I also dislike spontaneity: if I’m invited to do something without a good deal of notice, the process of shifting my energy and focus towards the thing I’m now actually doing, rather than the thing I thought I would be doing, is an unpleasantness even if I enjoy the former significantly more than the latter. And I become tired very quickly when required to do something my dad rather eloquently calls ‘socialising in cold blood’ – spending time with large numbers of people I don’t really know and nothing to do except talk to one another.

Ugh. Socialising.

It’s useful to know that these are my natural inclinations, that they are products of my innate character rather than the circumstances around me, and that if other people cause me upset, or vice versa, this may well be the result of a clash of personality types rather than any culpable malice or neglect on either part. For instance, my hesitance to agree to a spontaneous activity could be perceived as a rejection of the activity, or the company in which it would take place, when in fact, the spontaneity itself is what’s perturbing me; or I might become irritated at someone leaving me with less exhaustive instructions for a task than I would like, when that person is simply of a more think-on-one’s-feet-type temperament and thought to do me a favour by not bogging me down with excessive detail.

So, knowing one’s personality type is helpful for anticipating the kinds of areas in which one is likely to have to make allowances for others. Moreover – and this is really the heart of what I’m getting at – I propose that the best use for that knowledge is to help us make such allowances. I propose that, in an odd sort of way, the best use of the knowledge of one’s personality type is to enable one to act against the grain of it where necessary, rather than to provide an excuse for indulging one’s preferences without restraint. Bear with me a little, and I’ll try to unpack that a bit.

An old friend and myself spent several happy minutes the other day Googling ‘what each personality type does’ and seeing how well we matched up with the suggestions the Internet had to offer. My friend is an INFP and found the Internet’s perceptions of her to be of varying accuracy – but not only because they sometimes drew strongly on aspects of her personality type less manifest in her personally. This, for instance, is what an INFP supposedly does at a party:

Tells everyone at the party how much they love them and then drunk dials their ex and cries.⁵

The drunkenness described is a situation that simply cannot apply to my friend, because, for religious reasons, she doesn’t drink alcohol. My friend has made a decision about how to behave that renders the natural inclinations of her personality type irrelevant. She is conducting herself according to an external moral standard, rather than her own personal predispositions.⁶ I, similarly, aim to conduct myself according to the desires of my God as laid out in the Bible, which are, again, an external moral standard totally independent of my personal predispositions. And that means that I shouldn’t be allowing the desires which I am able to identify as being down to my personality type to take precedence over that moral standard.

Let’s work a couple of examples. What, according to the same article, does an ISTJ like me do at a party?

Stays mostly sober and low-key judges everyone else for acting like a drunken idiot.

This one, I have to say, I found fairly accurate. Now, not indulging in excessive drinking is certainly a Biblical behaviour,⁷ so in that respect, I’m lucky, because my natural inclinations make that behaviour easy for me. Judging everybody else as inferior for not according to the same behaviour, however, is distinctly un-Biblical,⁸ so that’s an element of my disposition I should make efforts to combat, rather than follow.

As another example, the same author has written another article called ‘What Each Myers-Briggs Type Does If They Like You’, and according thereto, an ISTJ like me

Rearranges their schedule in order to spend more time around you but fiercely denies their attraction until you make it clear as day that you’re interested in them.⁹

Again, it’s a pretty good match for what I myself would actually be inclined to do, but the outright lying involved isn’t exactly scripturally sound,¹⁰ even if the alternative to such fibbery¹¹ be Incredible Awkwardness. I am, in this scenario, once again required by the moral standard to which I try to adhere to act in contradiction of my natural inclinations.

That such a thing should be required of me should really come as no surprise. While no personality type or preference is naturally wrong in and of itself, that my natural inclinations should prompt me towards ungodly behaviour is an absolute given from a Biblical point of view. It’s been happening ever since Eve listened to the serpent¹² and we all of us fall prey to it.

The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? – Jeremiah 17:9

The trouble with giving a label to a natural inclination is that it then becomes a component part of one’s identity, which makes it easy to justify behaving according to its prompts regardless of whether doing so is appropriate according to the moral standard one follows. For instance, I personally have no natural desire to stay behind after church on a Sunday and chat to people I vaguely know over assorted beverages. Naturally, I would much rather go home and read a book or watch a boxset¹³ or translate some Hebrew or something. On the other hand, however, the Bible tells me that God is pretty keen on his people actually spending time together and encouraging one another,¹⁴ and post-Sunday-service beverage time is a key opportunity in my week to do that. Now, if I had no idea what extroversion and introversion were, if my only justification for not staying after church was that I didn’t feel like it, that would look pretty lame next to the contrary exhortations of the word of God, and I’d be content enough just to deal with the fact that I didn’t feel like it and get on with the always painful but, admittedly, usually ultimately rewarding process of introducing myself to someone. Knowing myself to be an introvert, however, gives me a ready-made excuse as to why after-church chinwags are simply not my vocation. I’m an introvert; it is against the very nature of my being to stick around and be sociable for any longer than strictly necessary; I won’t do it. Like Mulan in that clumsily-scripted sequel whose only really good bits are a song or two and the really dramatic bit where Shang does an awfully good impression of having fallen to his death,¹⁵ I could claim that my duty is to my heart. I could even go so far as trying to put the blame on God: he made me like this, he gave me this preference, so it would be unfair of him to ask me to do anything that contradicted it.

 

This lady doesn’t look much more thrilled by the prospect of post-service beverages than I usually am.

But God doesn’t ask us to live in accordance with our hearts, our natural preferences, but with his will. He asks us to do that even if it’s painful: “if anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.”¹⁶ I am to deny myself – yes, the very nature of my being – where it prevents me from fully following Jesus. I am to deny my ISTJ-ness where it conflicts with God’s will and purpose.

So what, then – if our preferences prompt us to sin, will we all, upon being made perfect in God’s New Creation, be rendered clean and blank of any preference, any personality, at all? Um, that would be a no. We’re not designed all to be the same; the whole the-Church-as-one-body-with-many-parts metaphor is clear enough on that front.¹⁷ My ISTJ-ness is, like every aspect of our fallen world, a good thing that sin persistently hijacks for wrong purposes, to such an extent that I can’t imagine what it would look like for it to exist without that persistent hijacking. And, because it is a good thing hijacked for wrong purposes, by fighting against those wrong purposes I restore its goodness to it. In other words, when I deny those wrong urges to which I am more susceptible than others on account of my ISTJ-ness, I am actually being a better ISTJ person than when I surrender to them.

I realise that last bit sounds rather abstract and unlikely, and I think that, again, that’s because we’re so riddled with wrongdoing that we simply can’t envision what it would be like to have different preferences and personalities without sin getting in there somewhere. But in any case, my duty, as a follower of the Lord Jesus, is not to my heart – my preferences, my personality, my fallen human nature with its peculiar catalogue of flaws – but to him. After all, my heart is deceitful above all things, while Jesus is truth itself; my heart spills over with sin, while he is entirely without it. And that means that the ISTJ label, much as it is useful for revealing the factors behind aspects of my behaviour, is not to be used as a justification for that behaviour: that basically amounts to me saying ‘I’ll behave in such-and-such a way because that which is deceitful above all things is telling me to’. Rather, my MBTI result is to be used to help me to understand myself better, and where lie my strengths and my susceptibilities, so that I might be better aware of where I am likely to be required to act in accordance with, or in opposition to, my natural preferences, and so be prepared for such action.

But then again, I suppose that’s exactly what a typically logical, rule-adherent, non-emotionally-driven ISTJ like myself would say, isn’t it?

Footnotes

¹ There’s a pretty good one here to get you started: https://www.16personalities.com/free-personality-test.

² Information paraphrased – and, where in italics, directly quoted – from the Myers & Briggs Foundation website, which is a pretty good indication of its reliability, for those of you fact-focussed types like myself who pay especial attention to such matters: http://www.myersbriggs.org/my-mbti-personality-type/mbti-basics/.

³ I learned about the left-brain, right-brain theory from a Horrible Science book called Bulging Brains, and it would feel like a betrayal to point you anywhere else for this information. There are one-penny copies going on Amazon if you’d like one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bulging-Brains-Horrible-Science-Arnold/dp/0439944473.

⁴ Too many sources of information for me to be bothered to cite them all (and, since this isn’t academic work, I rather pleasingly don’t have to). You’ve got Internet access: go fish.

⁵ That’s according to Heidi Priebe at Thought Catalog: http://thoughtcatalog.com/heidi-priebe/2015/05/what-each-myers-briggs-type-does-at-a-party/.

⁶ To be fair, I doubt that the friend in question would be particularly inclined towards drunkenness anyway, but my point still stands.

⁷ Ephesians 5:18 is the go-to verse, but drunkenness is also explicitly condemned in several lists of Bad Behaviours in Paul’s letters, as well as a number of times in Proverbs (23:29-35 are rather good fun; have a look: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs+23&version=ESVUK), and implicitly in various narratives.

⁸ Try Romans 12:3: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans+12&version=ESVUK. Bet you were expecting me to say something about logs in eyes or “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Aren’t I full of surprises? That little chunk of verses will be relevant later too, though, so do keep it open.

⁹ It’s the lovely Heidi Priebe again: http://thoughtcatalog.com/heidi-priebe/2015/05/what-each-myers-briggs-type-does-if-they-like-you/.

¹⁰ Psalm 101:7, for instance: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+101&version=ESVUK. Please do read the whole psalm: it’s only short and context matters.

¹¹ Not a real word, but I really think it ought to be.

¹² Genesis 3: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis+3&version=ESVUK. But you knew that, didn’t you?

¹³ I’m currently enjoying the first series of Reign, which is a shamelessly fun drama of exactly the type I’d been missing of late. Fancy an extended promo for the first episode? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX7e0IlLucs That friend I mentioned earlier and I sat in front of five consecutive episodes while eating cookies and grapes and chocolate fingers the other day and it was joyous.

¹⁴ Hebrews 10:25 would be the standard verse on this point: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=hebrews+10&version=ESVUK.

¹⁵ Here’s the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZw3BSqTruA. Not many points for originality, but it would nevertheless surely be pretty high on the Best Disney Death Scenes list if he, you know, actually died.

¹⁶ Matthew 16:24. And also Mark 8:34. And also, with one minor change, Luke 9:23. I have an inkling this might be something Jesus is pretty keen for us to do.

¹⁷ I said you’d need Romans 12 again; now is the time. (The link’s in footnote 8, if you didn’t spot it earlier.)

Three Reasons to Be Genuinely Thrilled About the Judgey Bits of the Bible

“‘Percy, think,’ Chiron said. ‘You are the son of the Sea God. Your father’s bitterest rival is Zeus, Lord of the Sky. Your mother knew better than to trust you in an aeroplane. You would be in Zeus’ domain. You would never come down again.’

Overhead, lightning crackled. Thunder boomed.”

Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2005)

 

Because, oddly enough, nothing says justice like a small wooden mallet and some obsolete measuring equipment. Thanks to JanPietruszka at freedigitalphotos.net.

I have a problem with the judgey bits of the Bible.

The fact is pretty obvious just from the way my heart sinks when I turn to the passage for the day given by my Bible-in-five-years reading plan and it starts with something like “The oracle concerning Tyre. Wail, O ships of Tarshish, for Tyre is laid waste, without house or harbour!”¹ Aw no, I think to myself, it’s a judgey one today. A similar thing happens when I’m browsing the book of Psalms for something to help get me into a correctly worshipful mood. My eyes alight on a promising-looking opening verse or two – Psalm 9, say, which begins, “I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart; I will recount all of your wonderful deeds. I will be glad and exult in you; I will sing praise to your name, O Most High.” And I’m there having a simply lovely time until I hit verse 3: “When my enemies turn back, they stumble and perish before your presence.” Cue an awkward squirm on my part – but it gets worse: “You have rebuked the nations; you have made the wicked perish; you have blotted out their name for ever and ever. The enemy came to an end in everlasting ruins; their cities you rooted out; the very memory of them has perished.”²

Frankly, all this talk of people perishing and having their name blotted out for ever and ever and coming to an end in everlasting ruins makes me rather uncomfortable, especially because it’s put across as a Good Thing: “For you have maintained my just cause; you have sat on the throne, giving righteous judgement,” is the fourth verse of the Psalm I quoted above, right in the midst of those judgey bits and, by syntax and logic, pretty inextricable from them. It disconcerts me that I’m apparently supposed to be on board with all this judgey stuff. The easiest thing to do is to sort of skim over it. I don’t mean outright pretending it doesn’t exist, in some sort of phenomenally extensive cut-and-paste job, but rather choosing to place greater emphasis elsewhere. I don’t think I’m the only one given to such tendencies, either: they seem pretty well rife among my fellow-believers. For instance, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard read the first seven verses of the ninth chapter of the book of Isaiah – that lovely Christmassy bit about the people walking in darkness having seen a great light and a child being born unto us and that – but I can’t recall any occasion of corporate worship in which I encountered the chunk of verse that immediately follows it, which is subheaded ‘The Lord’s Anger Against Israel’ in the NIV, ‘Judgement on Arrogance and Oppression’ in the ESV. The chapter that began with a promise of “no gloom for her who was in anguish” ends thus: “Through the wrath of the Lord of hosts the land is scorched, and the people are like fuel for the fire; no one spares another. They slice meat on the right, but are still hungry, and they devour on the left, but are not satisfied; each devours the flesh of his own arm, Manasseh devours Ephraim, and Ephraim devours Manasseh; together they are against Judah. For all this his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still.”³

Grim, right? But – and it’s a big but – God does not allow space for me to be embarrassed about any of his attributes. Including his anger.

“For whoever is ashamed of me and of my words, of him will the Son of Man be ashamed when he comes in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.” – Luke 9:26

This is serious stuff. Being ashamed of the God I worship is a sin. Squirming uncomfortably at any of the truths about him revealed in the Bible is symptomatic of the perverse and pervasive corruption of my fallen, self-serving, evil-inclined, human heart, and is to be condemned as such. Discrepancies between my personal feelings and the truth of the Bible are rooted in the faults of the former, not the latter. In actual fact, even a sort of neutral outlook on God’s wrath and judgement, were such a thing possible, wouldn’t cut the mustard: if God is entirely perfect and praiseworthy, then he is perfect and praiseworthy in all aspects, which means his wrath too is perfect and praiseworthy. If I am to view God rightly, therefore, I need to understand it as such. Which being so, I can think of three good weapons with which to fight my embarrassment about the judgey bits of the Bible.

1) God is just.

You’ve probably heard this one a million times, but just think about it for a moment. Isn’t it the worst thing ever when things aren’t fair? From being told off at primary school for something someone else did to watching huge, multi-national companies go unpunished for rampant tax evasion,⁴ doesn’t it just grate? Isn’t it sickening to know that, right now, people are getting away with perpetrating the vilest sorts of crimes against their fellow humans, and to be unable just to charge in there and put things right? How glorious would it be, how satisfying, how much of a relief, for someone to do that – entirely and perfectly to restore every circumstance to a state of total justice, no short change or soft sentences involved?

Let’s revisit Psalm 9: “But the Lord sits enthroned for ever; he has established his throne for justice, and he judges the world with righteousness; he judges the peoples with uprightness. The Lord is a stronghold for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble … the Lord has made himself known; he has executed judgement; the wicked are snared in the work of their own hands.”

God as judge not only has the power to subject every part of his creation to judgement, but also the inscrutable moral authority. God’s judgements are right and fitting; they are just, by definition: he sets the standard. There’s no wriggling out of God’s judgement, nor does he play favourites: this is not the kind of judge, for instance, to draw an example from a recent news story, who will recommend that a rapist be given a lighter sentence because said rapist happens to be really good at competitive swimming.⁵

That aching longing we feel for justice to be done is just one strand of the groaning of all creation as it waits for everything to be put right. God’s ultimate judgement hasn’t been enacted yet, but he is not deaf to the cries of the oppressed. Justice will come. When it does, it will be perfect. And the judgey bits of the Bible testify to the fact.

                                                                                               

2) Sin’s days are numbered.

So the enacting of God’s ultimate judgement will, when it comes, put everything right, which is necessary because, currently, an awful lot of things are really rather wrong, and that’s down to a little something that, in Christianese, we like to call ‘sin’ – essentially, not doing things God’s way, which is a problem because, as we’ve seen, God’s way of doing things is entirely right and fair and just, and so any move away from it is a step in the direction of wrongness and evil and injustice. So whenever God expresses anger against someone in the Bible, it’s because that person has done such wrong as warrants it. God is not some petty, capricious deity whose fondness for smiting people is totally disproportionate to their deservedness to be smitten (as per my opening quotation); if his judgement seems overly harsh to me, that’s because I don’t understand how grave a problem sin really is. Sin is, after all, responsible for every single one of the injustices at which I was busy feeling utterly sickened a few paragraphs ago.

Plus, sin is rampant in my own heart. The more I see of what God is like, the more it becomes clear to me how corrupt I am in comparison. I can, in fact, barely breathe without entertaining some sinful inclination or other, and fighting that, in accordance with what I am commanded to do as a follower of Jesus,⁶ can be very dejecting. There just seems no end to it. The same old sins rear their ugly heads again and again: I give in, I repent, I give in, I repent, I give in, and it sometimes seems as if it will never get any better. One might easily start to wonder exactly what the point is anyway.

But that same ultimate judgement I was just talking about spells the end for sin. Perfect justice means that not only the symptoms of the disease will be done away with, but its root cause. It is impossible for sin – wrongness – to have a place in the perfect new creation that will result from God putting everything right. “Nothing impure will ever enter [the Holy City, the new Jerusalem], nor will anyone who does what is shameful or deceitful.” – Revelation 21:27

That means I can be encouraged that every effort I put into fighting sin is an effort for the winning side; such efforts, in other words, are guaranteed to come to full fruition. And it means I needn’t despair when I do give in to sin (as happens with quite phenomenal frequency), because I have been promised that it won’t keep happening forever. God refuses to put up with sin indefinitely, and the judgey bits of the Bible proclaim that zero-tolerance policy.

3) What happened at the cross was a HUGE deal.

There’s currently a bit of a discrepancy between my first two points. On the one hand, God is perfectly just and won’t allow anyone to wriggle out of facing his judgement. On the other, I am thoroughly riddled with sin and deserving of punishment. Things do not, thus far, look as if they are going to be particularly rosy for me when final judgement arrives.

Enter my third point. Another well-known chunk of Isaiah will be useful here:

“But he was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned – every one – to his own way;

and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all …

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him; he has put him to grief;

when his soul makes an offering for guilt,

he shall see his offspring; he shall prolong his days;

the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.

Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied;

by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.”⁷

It’s a prophecy about Jesus, and it’s really driving home the point (emphasis mine, of course). Jesus took the blame for our sins. He took the punishment we deserved, so that God could declare us righteous and perfect and worthy of his new creation without compromising on his perfect justice. God is just; sin’s days are numbered; and Jesus willingly paid for our sins so that our days don’t have to be numbered to match.

On this account, that same brutal intensity of God’s judgement that was earlier making me so uncomfortable is rendered utterly glorious. The first thing to learn was that sin is, to warrant such judgement, far worse than I ever realised. The second is that God’s love for me, to enact such judgement on his adored Son, must reach far more extravagant depths than I ever realised. If I skim over the issue of God’s judgement, if I try to tone it down or pass it off as no big deal, I actually end up undercutting the very qualities of love and mercy whose place among God’s attributes I was trying thereby to preserve. If judgement were no big deal, it would therefore have been no big deal for Jesus to undergo it for my sake, and the love demonstrated in the act would have been pretty minimal. As it is, by contrast, I can look at the cross, consider how absolutely horrific a thing it was for Jesus to undergo the judgement I deserved, and never, ever doubt that God must really, really love me to have carried out a plan like that.

So there you go: three ways to harness discomfort with the judgey bits of the Bible in order to praise God even more wholeheartedly. The judgey bits declare God’s perfect, unflinching justice; they expose the severity of sin even as they promise an end to it; and they bear witness to God’s infinite love and mercy in reconciling these two the way he did, pouring out judgement on Jesus, who was sinless, so that we who are sinful might join him in the perfectly right and just world to come.

Thank God for the judgey bits.

Footnotes

¹ That’s Isaiah 23, which I read on Friday 27^th May. As you may recall from my January post ‘That Kind of Woman’ if you have an especially good memory, I stole the plan I’m using from the website of some church or other: http://southvalleychurch.com.au/5-year-bible-reading-plan/. It’s going well so far. Can recommend.

² And here’s the whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=psalm+9&version=ESVUK.

³ See for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+9&version=ESVUK.

⁴ The creators of BBC Three programme The Revolution Will Be Televised have come up with some rather entertaining ways to respond to tax evasion. Among the companies they’ve taken on are Amazon, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuaUD_2phlg, and Google, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJPuUNN96PU.

⁵ I rather annoyingly appear to have misplaced the relevant article. I’ll endeavour to find it, but if any of you lovely readers are familiar with the story and either have a link I could use or can remember some specific details that might make my search-engine-based quest more efficient, do let me know.

⁶ Take Colossians 3, for instance: “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you: sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry. On account of these the wrath of God is coming. In these you too once walked, when you were living in them. But now you must put them all away: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk from your mouth.” https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=colossians+3&version=ESVUK.

⁷ Whole chapter: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=isaiah+53&version=ESVUK. Go on; it’s an absolutely brilliant one. Really, I’m spoiling you.