Interpretation through Expectation
Expectation is a big word. It has several levels to it. There are expectations that are somewhat realistic and some that look more like really wishful thinking. Much of our interpretation of the Bible has been governed and controlled by really wishful thinking.
As we attempt to analyze what is being said in scripture, we often do so with specific expectations in mind. Presuppositions if you will.
Take a little trip around the globe:
Stop over in Madagascar.
Learn a little Malagasy and chat with a local fruit and vegetables vendor in a market place in Antananarivo.
What is their belief system?
Do they see life the same way that you and your friends and neighbors do back home?
Why is it that they think so differently from you?
My father in the 70’s, as a missionary for the churches of Christ, went into the interior jungle of Madagascar where they had never seen a white man. He took a translator and guild. He spoke French, as does much of Madagascar but that would not do in the jungle. Here they worship their ancestors and the crocodile.
To make a long story short, a baby was ill and they were about to feed it to the crocodiles. He tried to buy the baby, but they would not let him unless he bought the mother as well. So he did. He took them both out and took the baby to the hospital where it recovered.
The mother was “converted” and “baptized”. There was nothing to do, however, but take them back. So he returned them to her village in the jungle.
Apparently the elders of the village were not pleased. Someone managed to poison him in some juice that he was served. My father was gotten out and flown to a hospital in Mauritius where he was in a coma for days.
Completely different paradigms encountering each other. Different people each with the same potential learning capacity, and each with extremely different expectations about life and after-life. Each looking at life through a different set of presumptions and presuppositions.
Take a trip in time:
Stop over in Salem 1692 for the witch trials.
People interpret through their expectations. People expect to be proven correct concerning their expectations. Underneath we are fragile, afraid that our expectations are wrong. Very often we are driven by fear, not by love. We expect to be proven correct not because we are so very self-assured, but because we are so insecure. The one who accuses the other of being highly emotional in reason and logic is often the very one who is. The expectation that love is the final answer is the higher expectation than that of fear, which exerts its own very powerful emotional affects. Many quite negative.
You cannot stop from being an emotional being, because you cannot stop from allowing emotion from having some affect on you. The pretence of being able to set aside emotion and read the scriptures is another example of wishful thinking.
Love and fear are not mutually exclusive in their global affects and benefits. However, love is the higher expectation. It hopes all things and it believes all things. It casts out fear as the conclusive and final expectation of life and God. Fear and wrath may then been seen as tools to an end which is concluded in love.
This is the setting in the ending of the age. The old covenant mode of existence had fear as its foundation. Jesus told them that their deepest fears would be realized, as the age in which they were so attached to, would pass away. What they could not see clearly is what was about to be. Their expectations concerning God that he was a God that was to be more than anything else, feared, would come upon them. But was that really the finality of it? Could there be a final conclusion of love beyond this wrath?
Believers were told to expect something different. Intact entrance into God’s new age. Entrance without the destruction of the flesh. Entrance with a reward for what they were then doing prior to the end age they were then in. They were told, “God is love”. They were told to be like God and love and bless their enemies.
We stand back approximately 2000 years after the fact and try to place this information in view of and in perspective with our own expectations.
Some of us expect the Church of the last 1900 years to be vindicated for what we presume to be God’s intent concerning the Church of the last 1900 years. So we build up a systematic theology to support it. How much do ya want to bet we got lots of proof?
Some of us expect that our denominational precepts will be proven correct. After all, this is what we have learned and accepted. With hundreds of theologians with PhDs all saying quite different things, we can still be sure that our own expectations will nevertheless be proven correct.
Some expect that the purpose of salvation is to determine our eternal security. A matter of if we go to heaven or go to hell. Again, this is what we have learned and accepted.
Of course, we can take a couple of different roads for this one.
God predestined everyone before time to go to one or the other and this is “very good”. Not only are there few that find it, but few that are predestined to knock so that the door could be opened. And the first-fruit (first century) followers of Christ are told to love like God loves and so bless those that curse them. Wherein the finality of the matter is not love but appointed, predestined eternal torment.
But, don’t judge God! God has the right to do this to ones He loves. Or perhaps God never loved them and told the first-fruits to love maturely as he himself does not love. This is making more sense all the time. Could it be “convoluted” logic is getting the better of me?
Or, God gave man so strong a will power that he is even able by that will power to believe eternally his own self-delusion of reality and so, believe what he wants too forever. With enough strength of character he can face the glory of God in defiance. In the presence of the Almighty, only through duress, being forced against his own incredible strength of character and will power he in resistance kneels and confesses Jesus to the glory of the Father. Yes indeed, to resist to the bitter end. What credit we give to such a man. Guess Paul's will power was not quite up to that level. When confronted by Jesus the self confessed chief of sinners folded immediately.
Or, the ignorant and unbelieving are simply annihilated. He loved them but couldn’t help them! Those unfortunate souls who died in past times and were designated to be annihilated in the Judgment of the last day. Yes, those who died in Sodom now sentenced to annihilation because God failed to produce as many marvelous signs for them as he had in Capernaum. He loved them, but not enough!
Or, "salvation" means something other than the post-mortem determination of eternal security.
Perhaps it is time to reexamine our expectations and the foundation of those expectations.
By Barry Dupont
