We are making our way through Alec Motyer’s excellent little book: 6 Ways the Old Testament Speaks Today. First, it speaks in history, and second it speaks in religion.  Mr. Motyer says that there is one key verse in the Old Testament that explains why the whole system of sacrifices and offerings works and that is Leviticus 17.11: For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.

Mr. Motyer writes incisively: “Look carefully at this verse. It teaches that one life is laid down as the equivalent of another, that this is the gift of God, and that the heart of the matter is the payment of the covering price. When the covering price is paid, the debt is discharged and gone forever.”  (p. 44).

A sacrifice allowed one’s sin to be paid for and after it was paid for, it was effectively discharged and no longer accounted against the individual.  The key issue here is that God made the way for sin to be forgiven: I have given you.  Mr. Motyer goes on:

“The sacrifices are not a human device to put pressure on the holy God—that is the way every other religion operates, the principle of meritorious “works,” of human acts to win/compel divine favor. Here it is the Lord providing a solution to the dilemma of human sin and unworthiness, the religion of divine action, of grace.” (p. 49)

We too often think that the Old Testament sacrifices were the Hebrews doing the right thing so that God could forgive their sins, but that is not how they worked.  God gave them the system of sacrifices so that their sin and unholiness wouldn’t completely separate them from a holy God.  The sacrifices, in other words, were grace in action!

“Should we not prize—and go all out to understand—what was so precious to our Savior?” Thus writes Alec Motyer in the introduction to his book on the Old Testament.  I love this comment so much that I decided to blog my way through the book.

It’s a sad fact of our day that we, as followers of Jesus, do not really have a deep understanding of the Old Testament. Mr. Motyer comments:

“And when we turn to the highest authority of all, the Lord Jesus Christ, what do we find? Well, if we had asked him, “Why do you keep quoting the Old Testament?” he would have replied, “The Old what?” And when we explained, he would have corrected us: “You mean ‘the word of God’ (Mark 7:13), ‘the Scriptures’ (John 5:39)”—nothing “old” about that as far as Jesus was concerned, for it is actually the applicable truth of God by which he was content to plan his life and accept his cross (Matt. 26:53–54).” [6 Ways, pp. 13-14, Kindle Edition]

The Old Testament is the Scriptures that Jesus knew, loved, quoted, and applied, so if we are followers of Jesus and love him, then we ought to love the Old Testament like he did.

In his opening chapter, Mr. Motyer writes that there are five things we can say about Old Testament history:

1. Old Testament history is reliable.
2. Old Testament history is selective. Here we get treated to Mr. Motyer’s sense of humor.  He writes that even the most exhaustive history does not contain everything.  For instance:

   “H. A. L. Fisher wrote his History of Europe without making any reference to my grandmother. The same is true of R. F. Foster in his book Modern Ireland 1600–1972, even though the old lady lived in Ireland well within this period.” (6 Ways, p. 19.  Kindle edition)

3.  Old Testament History is God-centered. Mr. Motyer writes: “One major lesson of all the history books, and one reason why so much of the Old Testament is occupied with history, is that we may see that behind all events and behind their whole sequence is a great and wonderful God engineering and controlling everything and working his purposes out in the flow of history. “(6 Ways, p. 23, Kindle edition)
4. Old Testament history is moral.
5. Old Testament history is a record of failure.  Mr. Motyer: “Old Testament history is one long cry for something better, for a true king who would satisfy his people’s aspirations for peace and safety, reigning in perfection and ruling in righteousness. Like every other “voice” in the Old Testament, the voice of history is a prayer for the coming of the Messiah.” (6 Ways, p. 26, Kindle, emphasis added).

Gina Royal is surely the stupidest woman who has ever been invented in literature, Her husband, a psycho serial killer who in between torturing and murdering women is a very good husband and father, is arrested and prosecuted at the beginning of this book for being a psycho serial killer. Now, Mel–psycho husband–does all of his torturing and killing, guess where? IN THE ATTACHED GARAGE! Apparently he walled up the entrance to the garage and closed in the garage door and made an attached carport so brilliant Gina NEVER has to go in the always locked and padlocked garage, and she never does go in there. So Gina is SHOCKED, SHOCKED! when an SUV accidentally drives through the garage and the whole, sordid serial killing plot is exposed. This all happens in the first chapter.

Now, I am thinking, surely poor Gina is not that stupid. Perhaps this book is like “Gone Girl” and we will meet psycho Gina halfway through the book and find out that she is in cahoots with her husband. Nope. Gina really is that stupid and never suspects a thing even though nasty smells come out of the garage (“a raccoon died in there,” is her psycho husband’s explanation, which Gina believes without checking, naturally).

Gina’s stupidity doesn’t end with her acquittal as an accessory to murder. She goes on the run with her kids to hide from her psycho serial killer husband (who is in prison) and the various weirdos on the internet who want to track her down and kill her because they all think, “surely Gina couldn’t be that stupid. She is obviously guilty.”

[Note to various weirdos on the internet: You are mistaken. Gina really is that stupid and innocent.]

Gina piles on the stupidity when she goes to see her psycho serial killer husband in prison. I still don’t understand why she felt the need to do this, but it becomes the way that her psycho serial killer husband invades her life even though he is in prison.

The book eventually manages to become a murder mystery, but the beginning was so implausible and unbelievable that it just ticked me off for the entire book and made everything that followed not believable.

Emily Sutton-Smith does a fantastic job reading this book [I listened to the audible version], which is the one bright spot. She has a voice that is very easy to listen to, and does the characters quite well.

I hated the movie Home Again with a deep and abiding hatred.  It’s a caricature of everything bad about Hollywood.  For starters it’s labeled a “romantic comedy,” even though it isn’t very funny at all, and the romance consists of a 40 year-old, not yet single, mom, jumping into the rack with a 27 year-old aspiring movie producer, even though she is still married–but it’s okay because she’s been separated from her husband for five months.  What is she teaching her two young daughters in the process?  The movie doesn’t really care and certainly doesn’t bother to stop to even ask the question.

Three young aspiring movie producers meet Alice Kinney, daughter of the famous movie director, John Kinney, at a bar where she is celebrating her 40th birthday.  They begin to party together and next thing you know she invites them home for the night because they (conveniently) need a place to stay [Now THERE is an excellent mom, right?].  The three discover the next morning that she is the daughter of John Kinney.  Alice [Resse Witherspoon] eventually invites them to use the guest house, presumably so she can sleep with one of them?  Yeah, like I said, great mother here.

The trio begin to connect with Alice’s daughters and pretty soon they are somewhat of a “family,” or at least Hollywood’s definition of a family, which appears to be: “anyone who happens to be living in or around one’s house.”

As a plot complication, Alice’s husband decides to show up and this creates various awkward moments since the trio of film makers now consider themselves part of the family after approximately two weeks living there.  But don’t worry, that pesky husband will eventually demonstrate his true colors and go away, so Alice can continue sleeping with her 27 year-old boy toy.

Poor Alice has to kick the trio out after one of them gets into a donny-brook with her pseudo-husband.  Of course the kicking out doesn’t last long and she goes over to where the boys are staying to assure them that her loser husband is now really out of her life and the trio can all move back end, so they can be one great, big, happy, Hollywood family.

What we have here is further undermining of what a family is by a Hollywood that is all too happy to be the one who undermines.  “Family” is simply anything you want it to be, even if it consists of the world’s worst mother and three man-boys who may (but probably will not) be around for the long term, but hey, that’s okay, when they all leave, Alice can just find someone else to sleep with and voila!  A brand, new family.  Yippee!  Yay for Hollywood!!

Trapped in my window seat on the way home from Phoenix, and having flown enough that I exhausted all of the interesting movies, I decided to watch the movie Ingrid Goes West.

The movie opens with Ingrid Thorburn crashing a wedding in Pennsylvania and pepper spraying the bride in the face because Ingrid had discovered that she was getting married on Instagram and Ingrid hadn’t been invited.  Next stop: Mental asylum.  So opens this movie which lightly explores how the fake world of Instagram affects the actual world that we live in.

Ingrid, once she gets released from the asylum, spends her days scrolling through Instagram and tapping twice (thus “liking”) pretty much every photograph she scrolls through.  She does this almost by rote, as if it is a required school assignment and obviously doesn’t get any joy from what she is doing.  She is trapped and enslaved to Instagram.

Ingrid comes across a random woman in Southern California and gets infatuated with following her life, at the same time she receives an inheritance from her recently deceased mother, she turns the 60k inheritance into a bag of cash and off she goes to California, with renewed purpose in life: to meet and get involved in the life of Taylor Sloane, her new Instagram obsession.

She manages to succeed by discovering where Taylor lives and then stealing her dog, only to return it the next day as if she found it, to the great delight of Taylor and her husband.  They invite Ingrid to stay for dinner and the creepiness begins.

The one genuine person in the entire movie is Ingrid’s landlord, Dan Pinto.  Ingrid borrows Dan’s truck to do a favor for Taylor and in the process does 8k worth of damage to the truck while driving high on the cocaine she found in it.  Yeah, she isn’t very reliable.  Dan is not happy with her to say the least, although the relationship isn’t broken completely.

Ingrid and Taylor go through various adventures before Taylor discovers that Ingrid is a psycho stalker.   Ingrid concocts a plan to kidnap Taylor’s brother and talks Dan into helping her.  Needless to say, the plan goes awry and Dan ends up in the hospital having been severely beaten by Taylor’s brother, whom Ingrid knocks out with a tire iron.

At the end of the movie, Ingrid, at the lowest point of her life, films herself as she takes pills to commit suicide and admits that she is trapped by her penchant for following other people’s (made up) lives on Instagram, but doesn’t think she can change.  Of course, she posts the video on social media!  The video goes viral and she gets messages from all over the world about how beautiful she is and how they are standing in support of her.  Ingrid discovers all this when she wakes up in the hospital, having been saved from her pill overdose.

The movie ends with Ingrid smiling as she discovers that she is suddenly what she always wanted to be, an Instagram celebrity.

I think that the ending to Ingrid Goes West is purposefully ambiguous.  Has Ingrid been healed from her Instagram enslavement, now that she has broadcast her “real” self to the world, or is she instantly sucked back into the world of fake, made up lives on Instagram, now that she is an Instagram celebrity?  The viewer can take it either way.  For myself, I took it as the latter choice.  Her attempted suicide only fuels her rise as an Instagram celebrity and she hasn’t really changed.

The movie doesn’t analyze very deeply or very well the fake, made-up lives that occupy much of Instagram today, nor the affects of Instagram celebrity on individual lives.  It seems to be content with observation rather than attempting to delve into the subject well.  Perhaps the screenwriter was content to allow the observation to be the analysis.  At any rate, Ingrid Goes West does manage to be a cautionary tale of the dangers of addiction to Instagram (not to mention other social media) and how social media shapes our lives, in this case in a very negative way.

I’m trying to read 50 books this year and this book is number 5.

Flannery O’Connor once commented about her audience: “My audience are the people who think God is dead. . . . To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

I thought of Flannery O’Connor as I was reading “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” because in this short novel, Leo Tolstoy is going to hold us by the scruff of the neck and force us to face the reality of (our own) death. Ivan Ilyich is a normal Russian guy, who has a normal Russian life, until in middle age he gets cancer. During the cancer his life falls apart. His wife and daughter are basically annoyed with him because his illness is getting in the way of their lives. After his diagnosis Ivan sits down to explain things to his wife. Tolstoy writes:

“His wife listened, but in the middle of his account his daughter came in wearing a hat: she and her mother were going out. She sat down for a moment to listen to this boring stuff but she couldn’t stand it for long, and her mother didn’t listen to the end.”

Brutal.

Ivan is confronted–we may say slapped in the face–with his own mortality. Tolstoy:

“All his life the example of a syllogism he had studied in Kiesewetter’s logic–Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal–had seemed to be true only in relation to Caius the man, man in general, and it was quite justified, but he wasn’t Caius and he wasn’t man in general, and he had always been something quite, quite special apart from all other beings.”

Ivan has a general belief in death, but when applied to him specifically, he does not like the idea at all. Quite contemporary, Ivan turns out to be, for our culture is one that seeks to hide death and run from it as best we can. Leo Tolstoy is not going to allow us to run. He is going to force us to confront our own mortality.

We see it in Ivan’s plaintive cry as he gets ever nearer to death, suffering in deep and never ending pain: “There’s no explanation! Torment, death…Why?”

Why indeed.

The end is oddly hopeful, although Tolstoy doesn’t belabor the hope. I guess he wants us to figure it out for ourselves.

The second half of this book is Tolstoy’s own writing on his discovery of the meaning of life and it’s a good companion to Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy will basically answer the questions that he has raised (but not really answered) in Ivan Ilyich. Tolstoy eventually became a follower of Jesus because he could see no other logical explanation of any ultimate meaning in life.

He writes: “I understood the truth I later found in the Gospels, that people loved darkness rather than light because their actions were evil.”

Tolstoy begins what he calls “a search for God,” he writes: “This search did not come out of my way of thinking–it was even directly opposed to it–but it came out of my heart.”