365 Days of the Great Names of God, Day 213: Author

Author

"Let us keep looking to Jesus. He is the author of faith. He also makes it perfect. He paid no attention to the shame of the cross. He suffered there because of the joy he was looking forward to. Then he sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." (Hebrews 12:2 NIRV)

My Bible study sisters and I spent all of last fall and winter and a good chunk of spring studying the book of Jonah. Which, in my Bible, is two pages long. (We aim for quality, not quantity.)

Near the end of our slow but rewarding journey, one of my ladies remarked, "You know, Jonah was really a jerk." (Side note: honesty in women's Bible study is a beautiful thing.) I completely understood where she was coming from: Jonah was not exactly a warm-fuzzy sort of prophet. He disobeyed God, told the Creator he just wanted to be done with life, and was more excited about a plant that gave him a little shade than he was about the repentance of an entire (and exceedingly evil) city. It's probably no coincidence that most children's Bible versions of the story of Jonah pretty much just talk about the whale (ahem, "great fish") and leave it at that.

But Jonah illustrates what I think is one of the biggest selling points of the Bible: its Author wrote stories using flawed and messed-up people as His characters...major, minor, and otherwise. Of course, God would have to do this if He was going to use actual human beings as His characters since, the last time I checked, the number of flawless, neat-and-tidy humans amounted to exactly zero.

Granted, some of the players in God's great drama are easier to admire and imitate than others: my study sisters and I also spent some time in Ruth, and goodness, if that girl had a bad-attitude day, God sure didn't care to inspire any record of it in her namesake book. But even the "best" still fell short. As we do.

All this is so reassuring, because in the stories of these sometimes-unlikable, often-unreliable, and always-flawed people, we read our own stories. (I joked in Bible study that my summary for eight months of Jonah was, "Jonah was a jerk, and I am, too.") More importantly, we read that God uses the broken. As a dear friend of mine says, "He writes straight lines with crooked sticks"—her own delightful twist on the Spanish proverb, "God writes straight with crooked lines." I am SUCH a "crooked stick." But God has written His story using me and you in all our crookedness.

In the month ahead, we're going to take one last side trip on our Names of God journey. Bible characters whose God was the Lord (and some whose god wasn't) will be our tour guides. Retie your shoes, and let's walk this way together. The Author is still turning the pages of our stories, and we have things to learn while we wait to read the last two words: "The Beginning."