By Rev. Adam Anderson
Gracious God, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of each of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
God will not give you more than you can handle.
Clearly some folks in the choir have heard that before. Sure you’ve heard it too, and maybe you’ve said it. Somebody said it to you, maybe in a hospital hallway, and meant every word of it, in love. It’s not there, not the way we say it, but it actually is in there. Let’s listen again.
No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength. But with the testing, he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.
Did you hear it that time, all the way to the end of that sentence? Paul does not say you can handle it. Paul says instead that God provides a way out. There’s a word here in the Greek, ekbasis, and it means the exit. It means the door, the way through the wall.
And here’s what’s interesting. All the stuff that comes before it, which we didn’t end up speaking about, this whole chapter here in First Corinthians is about the wilderness. It is about a golden calf, and it’s about a people who got tired of waiting and built themselves a God they could manage. So in the end, this First Corinthians 10:13, that’s what Paul is warning about. He’s not warning about cancer or grief. He is warning them about pressure that makes you unfaithful. And we take a warning about manufacturing a manageable God, and we manufacture a manageable God out of it.
So really, God doesn’t give you anything you can’t handle was never about your pain tolerance. Instead, it’s a promise about God’s faithfulness to open something up when you feel walled in. This verse is not a promise, friends, that the thing coming for you will stay under your carrying capacity. It was never about that. It’s really never about measuring you at all.
And here’s a little secret. You did not need a seminary degree for that. You didn’t need to know the Greek. You just needed to read the sentence to the entire end of it.
I think we do this so often because we are hurting. We feel like we’ve got to fill silence and difficult moments with something, so we blurt out the thing off the top of our heads that we think will help, and it ends up becoming something I’d like to call scriptureish. That instinct is right. I think for so many of the weeks so far in sermon madness we’ve discovered that the book is written for things like that. But here’s the trouble. I think the small version can only comfort you in one specific way. It can promise hurt will be survivable. That’s it. That’s all it has.
And I have been around this world long enough now to know there is plenty we cannot handle. Burnout is real. Marriages end. The diagnosis comes back, and it’s the bad one. Have you opened up the newspaper today? There’s a lot we cannot handle. And yet, as a mantra, we say to ourselves, God doesn’t give me anything that I can’t handle.
And so now we’re left with this really difficult question. When we can’t handle it, whose fault does that ultimately become? We take a promise about God’s faithfulness and turn it into a verdict on ourselves. The verse that was supposed to hold you up is now going to be the thing measuring you, whether you’re strong enough. Because the second the mantra doesn’t work, it ain’t God’s fault anymore. Somehow it’s now yours. Because God wouldn’t give you anything you can’t handle. So if you can’t handle it, it ain’t God’s fault.
I think scripture offers something better than that.
Because if you remember, there is a story about a man who wrestled all night at a river because he wanted a blessing, and he would not let go until he got one. Jacob got it, and he never ended up walking the same again. The blessing and the limp came from the same hand, in the same grip, on the same night. So, my friend, scripture does not tell us that the limp was worth it. Scripture does not tell us it built his character up or made him who he was meant to be. It only tells us the fact that he was blessed. And it tells us then that he limped. Because in the end, the comfort is always there in the text. It just is going to leave us a little sorer than we ever want to be.
If you read long enough, you will find the book is full of people who were hurt and were still loved. Every one of them. And it turns out you lose all of them when you dull the text.
Which brings us to the second passage today, in Hebrews. Let us therefore, the writer writes, make every effort to enter that rest. Make every effort to enter rest. Strive at ceasing. Labor your way into the end of laboring. Work hard at stopping.
Do you hear how strange that is? Sit with it a little before we try to work our way around it. We are being invited to work really hard at not working hard. But I think that’s exactly what we end up doing with this Bible.
There’s a word we use to describe taking a passage out of its main context. People love to do this. It’s called proof texting. Because given any large enough book, you really can string together words that are close to each other. You can make Shakespeare into a story about alien invasion if you want to. But here’s the thing. Taking things out of context that hard, proof texting, is work. Proof texting is not laziness. It takes effort to make a verse say what you need it to say. It takes angling. It takes leaving off the second half of sentences. It takes intentionally saying, I’m going to ignore everything I learned in elementary school because I need it to say what it needs to say. It takes a system of work. No one accidentally builds an entire doctrine out of half a verse. That takes craftsmanship.
So what we’ve been doing is working too hard over a blade, friends, that was already sharp. Do you hear this again? In Hebrews, the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword. That is a verse most of us have heard given long enough in a church, and we all have the wrong picture of it. Because if I imagine a two-edged sword, it’s something I want to go out to battle with, right? The great sword, the two-handed blade, stained glass and a raised arm, something you will swing hard.
That is not the word that Hebrews uses. The word here is machaira. And machaira is actually a small blade. It’s a hand blade. You probably have a couple of machairas already turning up somewhere in a drawer you realize you’ve got to rearrange, and they turn up in your household inventory lists. They are in the ancient household inventory lists as well. Ptolemaic scrolls talk about the machairas sitting in between pots and lamps. It also turns up in a complaint from a man who got stabbed in the leg with one in the street. So it can be a butcher’s knife, and it is a weapon, and it is the same object.
And listen again to where the book of Hebrews takes this machaira: soul from spirit, joints from marrow. Friends, this is not the language of a battlefield. This is not the sword above the altar. This is a knife in a drawer, one that you open every day.
I don’t know if some of you grew up like I did, where this simple piece of machinery, this simple tool, this scripture, how I was taught to handle it was not to handle it at all. Have you ever seen that? The Bible that sits all the way up on the top bookshelf, and it is like you are not allowed to touch it. It sits there pristine, minus the dust that collects year after year because everybody’s too afraid to do anything with it. We make sure that it is revered, never once drawn on anything that might push back. Because after all, you can’t be cut by a blade that you won’t unsheathe. It’s not that we’re afraid of it exactly. I think sometimes we feel like we love it too much to actually let it out.
Did you know that there is a whole genre of YouTube videos where somebody tests a knife? Please go out this afternoon and take a look at these. Because they basically all do the same thing. I’m sure you wouldn’t be surprised. What they do is they take a knife and say, well, let’s see how dull this one is. And they try to slice it through some paper, or they try to cut a rope, or they’ll shave the arm hair just to prove how well they sharpened the knife. And at the end of it, you know something about that blade. You design a test, you run it, and then you have a result.
And I think this is what we do with scripture. We bring the verse to a test we built with an answer we already had, to certify that it says the thing we need. And then Hebrews finishes the sentence for us: that this sharp two-edged sword is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. Criticos. It discerns. It tests not your conclusions. It doesn’t test your intentions, not what you decide the text says. It is able to judge why you went looking in the first place. And take it from somebody who does this for a living and is very capable of knowing how to make this book say what I came needing it to say: the blade, my friends, is the one running the test. The paper is not the one that gets the grade. The sharpness of the knife is.
Now, I am not telling you that we shouldn’t keep studying scripture. I dedicated my whole life to doing that. I spent a whole week geeking out with Greek, figuring out where it says it in scripture and where it says it in random letters sent in the ancient world. I love this stuff, and I would do it over and over again. But I want to tell you what I think the training is for, why we should pay attention, and why we shouldn’t be satisfied with the quote-unquote biblical quotes in the Bible. Because I think the problem is we have it backwards.
If you have ever been taught to use a knife, you were taught to curl your fingers back, right? You let the flat of the blade ride against your knuckles. You make sure that you understand the center of gravity of that blade. You make sure that it is so sharp that it does what it needs to do. And that’s it. That’s the technique.
And once you start getting good at it, you know what it does. If I remember to do it, I don’t have to constantly look at my fingers to be certain I’m not going to chop them off. I learned how to use the blade. I don’t have to grip and make sure that everything’s okay. I don’t have to put all my weight down on it either. I don’t have to think about it. You learn where the balance point sits so that you can stop compensating for not knowing. Because I think every time we train a little bit more, it means we have to do a little less work.
There are home cooks and there are professionals. They have the same knife, the same edge, the same behavior in the hand. I’m fairly certain that the chefs down the street may have some speed, but we basically have the same technique. The chef is faster. The chef is not better at what a knife is. The pot roast comes out the same if we’re cooking it.
If you own a tool, I think you ought to at least get a basic sense of its form and its function. This is all. I think it’s worth asking.
But a dull knife takes some skill too. Have you ever had to do that, the one where you haven’t washed enough dishes and you’ve got to cut through your steak, and you just have to saw and saw and saw? You have to bear down. You have to want a tomato bad enough to put your whole weight behind a blade that just refuses to do it. I don’t know about you, but I have suffered the consequences of an overweighted knife on a tomato, and then I don’t get the tomato at all.
There is real expertise in managing a dull knife, but it is an expertise in forcing. Because I have friends who cook for a living, and I have watched them, and they do not work as hard as I do. When they’re working with their knives, they’re hardly working at all. They almost rest into their knife.
That, my friends, is what Hebrews offers us today. It’s not that you’ll figure it out. It’s not that you’ll finally get it right every time. It’s that you can stop sawing your way through the text.
And yes, it will still cut you at times. That’s not a malfunction, it’s the tool itself, because the word is living and active and sharper at times than we want, and it will find a joint sooner or later.
Rest, then, does not mean nothing will cut you. It means that you are not the one holding the blade.