Editing Your Own Story

It strikes me that we moderns have a peculiar genius for inventing devices that perform, with astonishing speed, tasks that once required the most patient and human of virtues. I was recently contemplating a clever idea for a sort of mechanical storyteller—a device using a camera and an artificial voice to scan any children's book and read it aloud. A rather wonderful notion, is it not? The idea is not wholly my own as it is inspired by my daughter's LeapReader pen and the joy she gets from being able to "read" these special encoded books while not knowing how to read herself just yet. I digress, nevertheless, this device's chief virtue, one imagines, would be its unswerving fidelity. It would not grow tired and skip a page, nor would it, in a moment of fancy, decide the wolf ought to be a vegetarian and edit the story on the fly. Its sole purpose would be to transmit the words on the page, exactly as they are written.

And in this simple function, I believe we find a mirror to one of the most profound and difficult challenges of the spiritual life. For we are all, in a way, tasked with reading a text and living by it. The trouble is, we are perpetually tempted to become editors.

Let us consider the grandest of all stories: the story of the world itself. We are given two texts to read: the book of Nature and the book of Scripture. And for generations, we have been told that these two books tell vastly different tales. The man of science, peering through his microscope, declares he has found a story of immense, near-infinite time, of life bubbling up from a primordial soup by sheer, undirected chance. He insists this is the plain reading of the evidence.

But is it? One must ask if he is truly reading the text as it is, or if he is reading it through a set of spectacles he forgot he was wearing—spectacles ground with the assumptions of materialism and deep time. To question these assumptions is not, as some would have it, an act of ignorance. On the contrary, it is the first step in honest scholarship, like a man wiping his spectacles clean to see if the smudge is on the glass or on the world itself. It is to ask whether another reading is possible—one where the evidence might just align with the other, older Book, which speaks of a world created with purpose and direction, a world marked not by endless, gradual change, but by cataclysm and divine intervention. The debate is not truly about faith versus facts, but about which narrative best fits all the facts, and which requires us to ignore fewer of them. It is a question of fidelity to the text.

And here, I fancy, we arrive at the very heart of the matter, laid bare in the tragic figure of King Saul.

I was inspired to write this post after watching the first two episodes of Amazon's "House of David." They have done a fine job with the show so far and I am excited to watch the rest. You know that that is good writing when the author makes you want to continue watching despite knowing the outcome! Still, I am only two episodes in. Saul was given the plainest of texts. It was not a complex scientific treatise or a dusty legal document, but a direct, verbal command from God, delivered by the prophet Samuel: he was to utterly destroy the Amalekites. Every man, every woman, every ox, every sheep. The command was absolute, a terrible but necessary surgery on a cancer that threatened the life of his nation.

What did Saul do? He obeyed, but only in part. He won the battle, which was the glorious part, the part that earned him the cheers of his men. But he kept the enemy king alive as a trophy and the best of the livestock as, he claimed, a sacrifice for God. He took the clear, simple text of God's command and decided to improve upon it. He edited it.

When Samuel confronted him, the scene is one of the most chilling in all of Scripture. Saul is not repentant; he is proud. "But I did obey the Lord," he insists, pointing to the bleating sheep and lowing oxen. He believes the grand gesture of his intended sacrifice—this magnificent, public display of piety—will surely cover his private act of disobedience. (The show does a brilliant job of displaying Saul's arrogance and the stark contrast to the unwavering faith and courage of Samuel, by the way).

And then Samuel delivers the line that ought to be carved into the heart of every soul who seeks to please God:

"Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the LORD? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams."

Saul's mistake was not merely in failing to follow an order. His mistake was in fundamentally misunderstanding God. He thought God could be managed, bargained with, and impressed. He saw his relationship with the Almighty as a transaction: "I will give you this magnificent sacrifice, and you will overlook my little editorial decision." He preferred the noise and smoke and spectacle of the altar—a ritual he could control—to the quiet, total surrender of his own will.

Of course we can look at Saul and see that his actions and pride are somehow beneath us. So let's look at another leader. This one whom God chose to write His law for His people. Surprise, we see this same fatal pride, this same desire to edit the script, even in a man as great as Moses. Near the end of his life, when the people cried out for water, God gave him a command of beautiful simplicity: "Speak to the rock." What an astonishing opportunity to display the gentle, effortless power of God! But Moses was old, tired, and furious with the people. And so, he reverted to a previous script. Raising his staff, he bellowed, "Must we bring you water out of this rock?" and struck it twice. The pronoun is devastating: we. In that moment of anger, he made the story about himself. He cast himself as the exasperated hero, not the humble vessel. He presented God not as a merciful provider, but as a grudging power to be wrestled with. Water came, yes, for God's mercy is larger than man's failure. But Moses, the editor, was barred from entering the land. His part in that chapter of the story was over.

I find myself drawn to these stories I think much in part to the relatability found here. The Scripture doesn't hold back from telling us the worst of these men whom God appointed to lead His chosen people. I find myself asking who am I going to be? My story is not over.

And so we find ourselves back where we started. Whether we are building a clever device to entertain children, investigating the origins of the world, or simply trying to live out our day, the fundamental question remains the same. Are we listeners, or are we editors? God is the author of the story. He does not ask for our brilliant rewrites, our dramatic improvisations, or our grand, self-directed sacrifices. He asks for something much simpler, and infinitely harder: our obedience. He asks that we trust His story is better than our own, and that we find our joy not in seizing the pen, but in faithfully playing the part He has written for us.

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Disclaimer: I don't fully endorse "House of David" but I did enjoy what I have seen so far. What I appreciate most is that the story has made me want to dig into Scripture all the more. There are embellishments and some great liberties taken on the unknowns of scripture, but they do seem (so far) to be getting the parts explicitly found in Scripture correct.