The Lesson Is in the Pattern
Must He Do It Yet Again?
The scriptures have many patterns. The scriptures’ dozens of inspired authors, writing down through the centuries with Holy Spirit guidance, recorded patterns from generation to generation, from historical setting to historical setting. Those patterns clarify and emphasize God’s intent. Read the scriptures for these patterns and the meaning that God wishes us to draw from their repetition.
God choosing the younger son over the older son, the second over the first, despite the natural order to favor the oldest, is one such pattern. The pattern repeats from God favoring Abel over his elder brother Cain to God choosing Isaac over his elder half-brother Ishmael, Jacob over his elder brother Esau, Joseph over his older brothers, Ephraim over his elder brother Manasseh, Moses over his elder brother Aaron, Gideon over his older brothers, and David over his older brothers. The pattern, enriched by each story’s details, suggests that God prefers the divinely fit, those who know God’s will, over the naturally favored. Humans looking to a tree for life is another such pattern. God first shows Adam and Eve Eden’s tree of life, from which they don’t get to eat because they first ate of the prohibited tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God then has Noah build an ark out of trees to save human and animal life. God later has Moses throw a tree branch in bitter waters to quench the thirst of, and to revive and save, the escaping Israelites. God then has Israelites, whom poisonous snakes bite, look at a snake lifted on a tree, to save their lives. The pattern repeats itself until men lift Jesus on a tree, saving all those who look to him.
Pattern inversions, though, are also a biblical technique. The pattern repeats itself from story to story, until the pattern reverses itself in the revealed archetype. So it is with the types of Christ. When God created Adam, the first human, in his image, he revealed a pattern of Christ, the Son of Man, to come. Adam, though, failed as God’s chosen partner, as did God’s chosen Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Solomon. Each chosen leader, supposed to save God’s people through relationship with God, had only temporary success, each succumbing, with the people failing and falling as a result. Christ, though, inverted the pattern. Jesus came as the Son of Man, the perfect human, whose servant leadership would save God’s people, indeed all willing humankind, through perfect sacrifice. At critical junctures, the Bible inverts patterns, arresting the eye, ear, and mind. The Bible’s inversions show that God, the supernatural creator, is not subject to the natural. With every inversion, God breaks through, transforming the human heart, bringing new possibilities, even eternal life. God does not act as humans act, nor as he set his creation to naturally work. Material, social, political, and economic orders do not constrain him.
And so, as the sun marches across the sky, east to west, for millennia, God once makes the sun stand still. Though women conceive babies only with the natural aid of men, God once sends his Spirit to the virgin Mary to bring forth his perfect Son. As Mary herself sang, God lowers the proud to elevate the humble and impoverishes the rich to bless the poor. Jesus multiplies a few loaves of bread to feed five thousand, inverting human scarcity into abundance, but then withers the fruitless fig tree, inverting the capable but unproductive into scarcity. These reversals are clearly acts of God, revealing his nature and desire. Scriptures’ inversions may indeed be necessary to reveal God’s action within his created order. How else could God reveal himself acting within his own creation, when his creation already reveals him? While the natural order itself reveals God’s grandeur and abundance, and his rule over chaos, his reversals of the natural order further reveal himself. Read the scriptures with due sense of wonder. Read for the subtle and profound ways in which God reverses the natural order. Know the beauty and benefit of God’s natural order, but know more the beauty and benefit of its one creator.
