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Anonymous asked: Hi Petey! I have a question. Where in the Bible does it talk about God not wanting us to mark our bodies (i.e. tattoos)? BTW, mine says Phil 4:13. Not that it's better, just saying. =) Thanks!
That’s a great question! In Leviticus 19 the Israelites are forbidden from marking their flesh with cuts or other symbols that honor the dead. To understand the Levitical reference, we have to understand that God is giving a base-line, culture defining system of laws, ordinances and commands that give a way of life to a people (Israel) who have no communal governance, or systematic rules of life. They had been a people group enslaved in Egypt and only knew life by Egyptian rules and customs and Canaanite (the land they went to after Egypt) rules and customs. This included their religious customs.
God wanted the people to be holy, or “set apart,” or different from the surrounding cultures, because they were to reflect his Glory and their (Israelite) reliance on his power and not their own, and this perhaps especially pertained to their religious customs. A popular Canaanite religious custom was cutting the flesh (I suppose a primitive form of tattooing) as a way of honoring and trusting in the ancestors of their families.
At this, I’d like to point out something very important to remember. This is not a case of God saying “do this because I told you so.” The original sin of Adam & Eve was deciding to trust in the created (themselves and Satan’s lies) rather than trust in the Creator. They trusted flesh over the eternal. This is the same thing that happens when Canaanites align their religious customs with their ancestors—they are trusting in the flesh over the eternal, the created over the Creator. Makes perfect sense why God is against the Israelite people partaking in any such custom, right?
There are two things to say about that: Because of the grace of Christ in which we trust, we aren’t bound to the Old Testament legal codes. And even if we were, which I strongly say we are not, that is not why we get tattoos in 21st century Western culture. At least not in my estimation.
Now, I do think we can get tattoos for prideful and sinful reasons. But I don’t think there’s any way in Scripture that we can say “God hates tattoos.” He doesn’t hate short hair, either, which is what the verse right before it in Leviticus should imply if we follow similar logic.
I love the Phil 4:13 tattoo, by the way.
The royal King who was a lamb who was murdered on a Cross.
-The Fellowship of Presbyterian Theology Project, Essential Tenet III, section A
I love how a formal theology statement from a historic denomination speaks of the exclusivity of Christ with such intentionality & grace. It’s clear that exclusivity is not about creating divisions or declaring victors, but about urgently and deeply valuing transformation and love.
…but falling down is not the End.
Death, dust, loss.
Hopelessness, brokenness, corruption, deceit.
In this Lent season, we want to soberly consider the depths of our despair. While this may sound morbid, it’s hopefully a dual reflection on our humanity and Jesus’s divinity. Plunging into the gospel plunges us into the extent of our self-worshipping corruption.
But it also plunges us into something deeper, wider, and infinitely more powerful.
Something beautiful rises out of the brokenness.
And though that something is not of our own power, it is something in which we participate with great joy.
May you take that seriously this Lent season in anticipation of the new, beautiful, resurrection life.
There’s a certain incompatibility that’s playing in my mind today.
We want to be “Christians.”
But we don’t want to be sacrificial. We don’t want the life of Jesus.
We want our life with a little Jesus sprinkled on top.
I don’t think we want to take seriously how far our lives are, naturally, from the life of Jesus.
I think the problem could be that we’re not being challenged enough on our current life—our choices, our hopes & dreams, our character, our selfishness.
In our minds we’re not really that bad. We convince ourselves that our lives are going pretty good, but we could occasionally use some spiritual guidance. Or some assurance. Or a few friends that encourage us a little more. And we’d like to give up that bad habit. But reform? A new life? Pshhh.
The contrast, is actually, quite simple. Jesus is calling us into the Kingdom of God, we are living in the Kingdom of [insert your name here].
They are not similar.
They are actually worlds apart. One desires the glory & fame of God, pointing to all of his goodness and mercy and love. The other desires the glory & fame of [insert your name here], pointing to all of your…something. Probably hotness & awesomeness, right?
The separation between the life of Jesus and the life of Petey is a great chasm, a wide distance, an unbridgeable gap. There is no way to dress up my life as the life of Jesus, adding a nice accessory here or there.
I am not similar to Jesus. My life is not like his life.
The best way I can say it, the best way the early Christians knew to say it, is that we must crucify our lives and assume the life of Jesus. We must put to death our earthly pursuits, imaginations, desires, loves, and embrace the path of Jesus (Colossians 3:1-17, for starters). It means, at its core, that we most want out of life what Jesus wants. His Kingdom, with all of it’s peculiar values and hopes and dreams, is now our Kingdom.
I am, sadly, constantly bombarded by evidence that we don’t want God’s Kingdom. We want our Kingdom with Jesus as the cherry on top, as it were.
That’s what is haunting my mind this morning. My prayer is that we embrace this hard but necessary path of life-upheaval.
Jesus didn’t come to make your life better. He came to make your life His.
I’m ready to bring this little girl home. That is all.
We’re not called to live lives of detached spirituality or serial do-goodery.
We’re called into the life of Jesus.
What does that look like, you ask? Sometimes pictures do more than words.
Lately I’ve been troubled by the misuse of the Bible, and perhaps more deeply the complete misunderstanding of its aim, purpose, and the conditions and opportunities from which it arose.
So this morning, while reading through today’s lectionary reading, I was looking at a small part of Hebrews and became overwhelmed by the amount of ways the passage could be abused if it wasn’t approached from a proper perspective.
And then it hit me, at a disconcerting but hopeful level, that I’m not always right. That I don’t always have the “perfect” perspective. And even if I did, there’s no way to get even a handful of people to see everything the way I see it, much less a lot of people. So where’s the hope?
Where’s the hope in that?
Here’s what occurred to me:
At the heart of every moment of Scripture, from small to large, is the condition of the human heart.
Now, you could make the argument that God is at the heart of every moment of Scripture, or Jesus, or something a little more holy. But all I mean is that the transformation Scripture is constantly beckoning and pointing to is primarily a matter of the renovation of the heart.
So I think we mistakenly go to Scripture to quickly, both personally and communally (I’m thinking about the sermon here) with “what does God want me to do?”.
But perhaps we should be more content asking “who does God want me to be?”.
It’s an incomplete answer, but I find hope in it.
Let’s start there.
I wrote this article for the PolicyMic online magazine. It’s brief and of course doesn’t answer every question about Evangelicalism, but I was excited to address some issues I saw plaguing the perceptions of Christians in the West.
