Biblical Worldview
It would be hard to overestimate the power of worldview. It’s like a lens that automatically and subconsciously filters out anything that doesn’t match expectations. One of the most incredible illustrations I’ve seen of the power of worldview is this simple, grainy video of teams of people passing a basketball to one another. If you’ve never seen it, do yourself a favor right now and join the 24 million who’ve taken the one minute test:
Worldviews cause us to interpret the world around us without all the data, because we simply filter out what we don’t want or expect to see.
Even though my target audience for this book is people who already have an affinity for Jesus, I’m not assuming a Biblical worldview as the norm. Barna research reveals that less than 10% of American adults have a Biblical worldview, and it’s dropping by the year: from 10% in 2016 to 9% in 2017 and only 7% in 2018. (*1) Since about 70% of the country self-identifies as Christian, but only 7% has a Biblical worldview, it’s safe to assume that what I’m presenting here will be new information for many.
The evolutionary psychologist author identified some challenges with the Western worldview that contribute to our poisoned partisan political landscape, using the world’s worldview as his lens. Now, let’s start from scratch and see where the Bible might cause us to land, and let’s use one of the most well-known stories of the Old Testament to illustrate.
Image: bingngu93/Pixabay
Moses is one of the Old Testament’s most well-known heroes. He was born to Jewish parents at a time when Pharaoh had enslaved all the Jews and felt threatened by their growing population. He had ordered the midwives to kill the male Jewish babies, but when that didn’t work, he ordered all baby boys to be drowned in the Nile. When Moses’ mother could hide Moses no longer, she placed him in a basket, floated him down the river, and prayed like crazy. In what must go down in history as a candidate for “best day ever”, Pharaoh’s daughter found the basket with Moses in it, asked Moses’ older sister Miriam to “find someone to nurse the baby,” and by the end of the day, Moses was back home and his mother was being paid to nurse her own son. (*2)
I’m certain Moses’ early years were
stretched out as long as possible, and
filled with his parents drilling into him who he really was.
Fast-forwarding through the next 75 years of Moses’ life, he grew up in the palace as if he were Pharaoh’s daughter’s own son. As an adult, when he saw an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Hebrew slave, he looked around, thought nobody was paying attention, and killed the Egyptian – his Hebrew identity was overriding his Egyptian identity. News spread quickly, and Moses fled Egypt, where he lived as a shepherd in the wilderness of Midian for 40 years. At age 80, God called Moses to return to Egypt to “set My people free.” Moses was reluctant, to say the least (see Exodus 3-4 for his long list of excuses), but he finally agreed when God promised to be with him every step of the way. (*3) Every time Moses (and his brother Aaron) told Pharaoh to let the Israelites go, Pharaoh said no, and God inflicted a plague, with each one more painful than the last one. (*4) The tenth and final plague resulted in the first-born male of every Egyptian household dying. The Israelites were instructed to kill and eat a lamb without blemish and put some of the blood on the doorposts so that the angel of death would pass over their homes. (*5) Hence, the Passover meal that Jews still celebrate today, and the reason that “Lamb of God” became a title for Jesus, who came to save all of us from eternal death.
Image: pasja1000/Pixabay
With pressure from all the grieving Egyptians who were still alive, Pharaoh not only let the Israelites go, but kicked them out of the country. Exodus 13-14 tell those stories, including the odd path God chose for them to take, right up to the edge of the Red Sea. By this time Pharaoh had unwisely changed his mind and decided he really didn’t want to see his free labor force evaporate, so he called for his best chariots and best army to go get the Israelites and force them to return back to slavery. By the end of Exodus 14, the Israelites are pinned between a rock and a hard place, with the Red Sea on one side and the Egyptians breathing down their necks on the other side.
Have you ever been there?
Most of us have been in such a predicament at one point or another in our lives: a place where we can see no way out, and unless God parts the “Sea” in front of us, we’re toast. There are problems so large, at times, that unless God solves them, they won’t get solved. One might argue that our Donkey Elephant War is such a situation.
There are two questions we can ask of this Exodus story that unless you’ve read Exodus 1-15 closely, you likely won’t be able to answer correctly. The first is,
Who parted the Red Sea – God or Moses?
And the answer is not one or the other, but “yes” – both. Clearly there was nothing Moses could do on his own to cause the waters of the Red Sea to pile up on both sides, dry land to appear in the middle for the Israelites to cross, and then the Sea to close back up at just the right time in order to protect them from the Egyptians in hot pursuit. (*6) Yet God told Moses to hold out his staff in the direction of the body of water, and God waited to part the Sea until Moses obeyed. It strikes me as similar to a young child begging his dad to let him help fix the car, so his dad says, “Sure, child, you can hold the wrench.” Our part compared to God’s part is usually miniscule. But more often than not, God waits to do His part until we’ve done ours, whatever big or little thing that might turn out to be. When it comes to God’s part/our part in the twists and turns of life, it’s usually a both/and, not an either/or. (*7) Our part pales compared to God’s part, but God will usually patiently wait for us to do what He’s invited us to do before He does the heavy lifting.
The other question addresses one of the many hard-to-understand statements in the Bible. The question is,
Who hardened Pharaoh’s heart, God, or Pharaoh?
If you’ve ever read Moses’ biography from the first half of the book of Exodus, it’s highly likely you stumbled over verses like this one:
The Lord said to Moses, “When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.” (*8)
That seems so unfair to a modern reader that it’s probable that it caught your attention. And it would be bad enough if it were in the Bible even once, but it’s in there a whole bunch of times. In fact, Pharaoh’s arteriosclerosis is mentioned 17 times in the book of Exodus. Case closed: God did it, right? Well, not so fast.
10 of the 17 times say that God hardened Pharoah’s heart;
4 times it simply says that his heart became hard with no further commentary; and
3 times it says that Pharaoh hardened his own heart.
So the correct answer to the question, “Who hardened Pharaoh’s heart: God or Pharaoh?” is “Yes”, just like the last question. It isn’t one or the other, but both. Here’s what makes this all the more significant. All the times the Bible says Pharaoh hardened his own heart are in the middle of the story. At the beginning and the end, God’s in charge. I find both parts of that observation incredibly comforting. I’m glad I have a part to play, but I’m even more glad that I don’t have the ultimate part to play. God gets things started and decides when (and how) they’re finished, with my part of the story landing somewhere in between. We completely miss those kinds of truth-nuggets when our worldview insists we choose between one side or the other side – or when our worldview causes us to filter out anything that doesn’t fit without even noticing it. The Bible consistently proclaims that God is all-loving and that God is all-powerful. We’re so Greek in our thinking that when those two attributes seem to crash into each other, we’re quick to jump to an either/or instead of a both/and. Most of us seem to be more comfortable with a God who’s all loving, so we’ll hedge our bets on the all-powerful part. But the Bible appears to be quite content to let the clash just happen rather than trying to resolve it one way or the other. And that’s because the Bible is very Eastern (Hebrew) in its worldview, from cover to cover. (*9) In my last eight plus years working full time to see Jesus’ John 17 prayer answered in my hometown, I’ve observed over and over again that a high percentage of unnecessary conflict simply comes from turning something God intends as a both/and into an either/or. (*10)
I’ve read articles by modern scientists trying to explain the phenomena of the plagues and the parting of the Red Sea, including the suggestion that perhaps a well-timed earthquake could have caused the Sea to part. It makes no difference to me whether or not we understand how God does the “miraculous” things He does. Our understanding of how God does something miraculous should simply add to the gratitude, not diminish it. If miracles in general are a stumbling block for you, refer to pages ??? later in the book.
My seminary training was Lutheran, and I can hear all my theology profs braying and stomping louder than any donkeys or elephants. When it comes to salvation, it’s all God. There’s nothing I can do to save myself, and no contribution I can make gets me any closer to the finish line of salvation. The hard-core Lutherans would want the paragraph to stop there, and I understand why. It’s grace, grace, and all grace. AND, unless one wants to take a universalist position that I find hard to justify Biblically, some of us receive/ acknowledge/ cooperate with/ align ourselves toward such a gift from God, and others don’t. That’s “our part”, such as it were.
Some people, knowing that the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, might find this confusing. But while the New Testament was written in the Greek language, every single author was Jewish, and spoke from a Jewish both/and worldview.
The examples are nearly endless, and my last book took a good part of a chapter fleshing them out, but here are a few, the answer to each being “yes”: Does God want worship to be emotional and expressive, or quiet and reverent? Does God heal by miracles or medicine? Does God speak through reason or revelation? Did Jesus come full of grace or truth? Is racism an individual or a systemic issue?