“This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your forefathers ate manna and died, but he who feeds on this bread will live forever." He said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum. On hearing it, many of his disciples said, "This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?" (John 6:58-60)
I had a sergeant in the Army who was always pushing us to do 10 more pushups, run another mile—anything to make us what he called: “harder than WoodPecker Lips.” One day, figuring (accurately) that as a Yankee, I had trouble with nature analogies, he asked me, “Cap’n, you know why God made WoodPecker Lips so darned hard?”
“Not a clue.” I replied. Actually, I was an atheist at the time, and I guess I believed that they had “evolved” that way or something. But I did not really want to get into a eschatological debate with that sergeant, because I was pretty sure I would lose and end up looking silly in the process. As usual, he went ahead and got me squared away anyway.
“Well, you see Cap’n, God may be a hard God, but he is loving God—to both man and beast. He wouldn’t ask a little bird like that to smash a hole in a tree with his head without giving him something really hard to do it with. So God attached the hardest thing he could find to that little bird’s face: WoodPecker Lips. Get it?”
I did get it. At least in the sense that I understood what he meant, even if I did not think that his “god” had anything to do with the design of birds’ beaks, or anything else. But many years later, by the grace of that sergeant’s God, I came to agree that God had in fact carefully, intimately and perfectly designed WoodPecker Lips to equip little birds to punch holes in big trees just by banging their heads against them. Hallelujah.
Now, I know non-believers and believes alike who think the word of God to be too hard. I can see why they think that. God’s word just does not seem to leave enough exceptions for the nice people we know who do not want to stop doing certain things the Lord told us pretty clearly not to do. And He sets this impossibly high standard of conduct, which (as if this helps) He points out to us that Jesus always met. Hello?! Jesus was God. We’re just . . . well, nice people. Jesus didn’t need any exceptions, but we do. Come on, You cannot possibly mean this to apply to us. A loving God would not ask us to accept a truth this hard.
But let’s look at it the other way for a second. Let’s assume God’s word is not hard, but soft. In fact, let’s assume that it is just as soft as we flesh-bags think we want it to be. Would that really be helpful to us? There are some pretty big trees down here in which the Lord seems to want us to punch holes. What good to us would it be if He equipped us with nothing but a mushy and earth-conforming truth with which to do it? Wouldn’t that be a bit like trying to punch a hole in a tree with nothing but human lips? That could get pretty messy—with not much progress to show for the effort. Is that how a loving God would equip his little birds?
He equipped us with all the tools needed to reach him and his way. It cons down to how we choose to use them. Amen.
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