What Swallowed Jonah? (It Was More than a Whale)
Вставка
- Опубліковано 1 жов 2023
- The story of Jonah employs all the major motifs of the theme of the chaos dragon: chaotic waters, a servant of God who rebels against him, and a great sea monster. But the story doesn't call it a sea monster-the story calls it a great fish! Join Tim and Jon as they discuss Jonah, thrown into the deep abyss and swallowed up by death, and the reality that even the belly of the beast is no match for Yahweh.
Show Music:
“Defender (Instrumental)” by TENTS
All music breaks are from “Lay Them Straight” by Everett Patterson with additional sound design by Tyler Bailey.
I just finished your class on Jonah on the app and with this podcast, it’s now my favorite book of the Hebrew Bible, well aside from Genesis. Thank you for all your amazing work to further the Kingdom of God. ❤
I really appreciate the wrestling Jon does with the question about why God would create the chaos creatures in the first place. I've wrestled with the same question for years and had many discussions with my high schoolers as I've taught about this subject. One of the things that I've begun to see is that the very laws of the universe require there to be a constant pull towards chaos, death, and decay. The second law of thermodynamics says this very thing, that all of creation is naturally headed towards entropy, towards complete disorder, towards uniform chaos. It's this push to entropy that allows expansion, energy expenditure, and life itself. But the push to entropy is the thing that will kill us all eventually.
The one paradigm shift I've had to have in order to fully appreciate God's purpose is regarding how I understand man's free will in the midst of this universal drive toward entropy, chaos, and death. Growing up in the church, I thought "free will" was man's ability to choose to do BAD. But what is the BAD that we choose? Isn't it nearly always simply choosing to either follow or accelerate the course of nature? Chasing my cravings and desires, my instincts, just like everything else in the universe, results in chaos, disorder, and ultimately death. And if those things are the natural course of things, then pursuing them is not "Free Will" at all.
"Free Will" is my ability to DEFY my natural, chaotic, disordered instincts and choose to swim upstream against the tumultuous flow of the universe towards entropy, chaos, and death. "Free Will" is the power to choose what is GOOD. It is learning that a certain action, plan, or the fruit of a certain tree will lead to death and deciding to resist my natural instincts telling me to take and eat. I believe it is through man's free will that God intended to ultimately tame the chaos monsters, large and small. And it is through the free will choice of Jesus, "Not my will but yours be done," that the chaos monster of death and decay was ultimately defeated.
Super interesting point about framing free will as doing something to "defy" our material bodies.
About chaos being necessary, I don't know if its a given that the universe requires it. If God can create a universe, then there might have been a way for the distribution of energy etc. to be perfect and self sustaining.
I do agree with your point that the second law of thermodynamics has a parallel in sin, that one of the fundamental tendencies of the universe is towards chaos and separation. But that "evil" is necessary for life, starts to feel a little Calvinistic in that some fraction of things were made to fail and be driven away from God. There's also the issue of the new heavens and the new earth, where presumably they are somehow similar to our universe (hence Christ's resurrection body that he appears to the disciples in), but don't need the evil and chaos to be sustained.
At any rate, really interesting perspectives, thank you for sharing!
Very very well stated.
Interesting discussion ❤😊
I think chaos is the consequence of free will. God created us with the ability to choose. If we don't have another option, there is no choice and there is no struggle.
may we see Your creation Lord as You want us to see it!
#surfnboy