“How I Went from Chump to Champ: My True Story” First-Person Sermon on Gideon meeting God (Judges 6:7-27 and Hebrews 11:1-2, 32-34).

 

 Bill, as Gideon, preaching at the United Presbyterian Church of Whitinsville, MA, August 17 in his regal hat with an “ephod” (symbolized by a brown vest). Picture by Aída Besançon Spencer

(Prayer before stepping up: “Dear Lord, you got me through these battles – I pray you get me through this Press Conference!  Thank you Lord in your mighty Name, Amen.)

Good morning. Thank you so much for this great gift of this snazzy vellum ephod and hero’s hat. Oh, please, don’t rush the stage – I’ll be giving autographs afterwards.  That is, if you still want them when you hear what I have to say. (To the side) Do these megaphones work? (Blows in them).

Okay, well – listen! - the reason I agreed to do this today is because I have just one message I want to give you neighbors and this is it:  Any one of you can do what I did – and maybe even more - if you let yourself be empowered exclusively by the one Great God.

  That’s it!  That’s my message! 

All right.  Now, let me start with a confession: I’ve never really been good at handling social pressure.  I’ve been bad at it all my life.  I think it’s a family failing.

Take my dad.  You all know my dad, Joash?  Right?  Yeah?  Well, you know how he’s always been such a model citizen and a loyal member of the nation and all that, yes?  Did you ever ask yourself why?  I’ll tell you why.  Because he’s a guy who doesn’t like to have any hassle with the neighbors.  You can’t blame him!  I mean, we’ve got our hands full as it is.

Look, it’s no secret that a lot of folks who used to live here have relocated.  A sizable group of them have taken off to the mountains – and I don’t mean for vacation either!  It’s been so hard for any of us to make a living.  Every business is in trouble – especially the farms!

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.  Every time we get a flock together or a crop ready to harvest, here come the Midianites and the Amalakites and who knows who – charging in off the desert! 

        They run off the sheep and camp out in the fields and, when they get done, with their camels stomping all around on everything, it looks like the 17 year locust infestation just hit us!  It’s awful and there’s not a blasted thing we can do about it! 

We’re not warriors.  Maybe we were back in the great Deborah’s time.  But, that was like 50 years ago.  We’re all farmers now and we’re knee-deep in debt with these marauders and their camels stomping all over the place, tearing up the fields, and running off with the cattle.  Not even the donkeys are safe.

And, of course, there’s more to this than just a raid or two.  For centuries, you know there’s been bad blood between us and the Midianites.  I think it’s because we’re related…  Midian was one of the six sons of Abraham’s wife Keturah.  But Abraham preferred our ancestor Isaac, the son of Sarah (our great, great, great, you know, a whole lot of “greats” grandmother.)  So there was jealousy there!  And don’t forget it was Midianite traders that bought our own ancestor Joseph and sold him into slavery in Egypt (Gen 37:28).  And it was Midian along with the Moabites (Num 22:7) who hired Balaam to curse Israel when our ancestors were arriving here, and when that curse didn’t work, they waylaid us by seducing some of our leaders into pagan worship (Num 25:1-6).  So, it’s been trouble since the beginning!  

And there’s nobody to come to our rescue.  Egypt is useless now.  Nobody’s keeping the peace.  So, we’ve got no place to turn.  It’s all up for grabs.

So, of course, given all this strife, my dad wouldn’t want any more trouble with the neighbors, would he?  Can you blame him?  I can’t.  He’s got hassle enough trying to keep the family fed.  I can certainly understand what he’s going through and what he was thinking when he put that big altar of Baal up in the backyard and that fertility pole to Baal’s celestial wife, Asherah, because that’s who everybody around us worshipped, and he was saying, in effect, “I’m a get-along guy.  I don’t want any trouble.  So, I’m going along with everybody else.  See?” “Look, I’m with you folks.  Whatever works!  Sure I’m a descendant of Abiezer, who was the son of Gilead, who was right straight out of the line of Manasseh, son of the great Joseph himself.  But, these days, I’m just trying to take care of my family, so whatever they got going in heaven, I’m for it.   All I know, is I’ve got to get some help from somewhere – because we’re not going to make it the way things are going! So, I’ve got my ends open – spiritually speaking.  Whoever works up there – and keeps the peace, I’m for them.”

In the meantime, all of us are crying out to the Lord God of Israel, hedging our bets. 

I mean, we’d heard the old stories about how God delivered Moses and gave us this promised land under Joshua and how nobody could stand up to us when God was blessing us and all that.  Sure, every one of us knew those accounts and sure hoped they were true, because we sure needed some divine help.  Every one of us knew we weren’t going to make it without something changing!

The way I figured it was – we got here to Canaan somehow, right?  Nobody else had a better explanation than the stories the Levites told.  I mean, that was our history.  God brought us here.  So, why wouldn’t God look out for us now?  It stood to reason!  But, in the meantime, we were all taking a beating from the Midianites and we’re all crying out to God and to whomever else we felt like crying out to. 

Though, not me, I was sticking with the Lord God of Israel, but I mean a lot of the rest of our neighborhood was trying out a bunch of divine options.  So, you get the picture?

Okay. So, one day this guy shows up.  I’d never seen him before, but suddenly – there he is.  He’s wearing this thick robe, like he spends a lot of time outdoors and he’s kind of unkempt, but he’s really different from every one of the rest of us.

He comes striding in off the desert and sweeps his eyes around all of us with this air of authority and starts right in – town to town, village to village, business to business, farm to farm.

No preliminaries or anything - nothing like, you know: “Hello, folks.  I hope you’re having a nice day.  You don’t know me, but I’m the answer to your prayers.  You all do know the Lord God of Israel?  Yes?  Well, you’re never going to guess who I had a chat with the other day.  The very Same!  And, you know what?  He’s heard your prayers.  No fooling.  He’s concerned and he’s going to schedule in a conference on your situation.  You should be hearing from his heavenly headquarters at some point soon with a few helpful suggestions for getting along better with the bullies from Midian.”  Something like that – the usual I mean, we’d heard the old stories about how God delivered Moses and gave us this promised land under Joshua officialese you get from a palace? 

Well, as you can imagine, it was nothing like that!  This prophet didn’t even say God was going to deliver us!  He just yelled at us for being unfaithful.  It was a general bawling-out.

And then I had another visit by another messenger and this one was just for me!

See, I’m working down at the winepress processing wheat, right?  I know!  I know!  You don’t refine wheat at a winepress, right?  But I got this great idea!

It wasn’t grape season.  So, I figured, not one of these marauders is going to figure out that I’m at the winepress working on the wheat.  Nobody’s going to look for food to steal there – at this time of year. 

So, I sneak down there under cover and I’m making the equipment for the grapes work for getting the wheat processed, so I can salvage the crop.  Pretty smart, huh?

So, here I am – I got a skeleton crew working so we don’t attract attention.  Just me and a couple of hired hands to help me bring in the sheaths of wheat and I’ve hidden the millstones behind the wine vats where we usually tread on the grapes. 

So, I post a look out, of course, and we’re working away as quietly as we can, peeling off the husks, cleaning and soaking the grain to toughen up the bran, so we can use the mill stones to break the kernels into pieces, flatten out the bran, and then sift it all through bolting cloth, so the brown bran and the yellow parts from the germ of the wheat and the layer of granules under the bran can sift through and produce that creamy brown flecked flour that’s so good?  Eh?   Of course, you’ve got to use it all fast so the wheat germ doesn’t turn dark and rancid.  But that’s not a problem, since we were practically eating on the run anyway!

Well, we’re just working away as quietly as possible – no singing or anything – because we were reasoning no one was going to figure out we were there.   Well, that’s what I thought. 

Okay, so you know where my dad’s winepress is?  It’s under that big oak we got on the property?  Over near the vineyards?  Yeah?   Well, we show up one morning with this wagon and we got the wheat under some old tarpaulins – you know just old ragged stuff that won’t attract any attention. 

We rumble up and just as we arrive at the big oak, we see this big guy sitting under it.  Oh, oh.  I thought – this looks like trouble.  How’d anyone find out we were coming here? 

We roll up by him. Then he stands up and I almost fall off the wagon.  This isn’t just some big guy.  I mean this person is like no one I’ve ever seen?

You think the prophet was impressive?  You should have seen this guy!  He radiates power.  He pulls himself up even larger, fixes me with his eyes and announces right directly to me, “The Lord is with you, you mighty warrior!”

Say what?  I’m like looking around at the hired hands.  They’re all shrinking away, edging out of the scene.  I’m just gawking at him, astonished:  “You’re talking to me.”  I mean, “mighty warrior?”  What’s wrong with this picture?

That’s what I’m thinking – but what I’m saying is, “But, sir.” I’m staying polite here – I mean this guy obviously is a mighty warrior I’m talking to – but I’ve got to ask: “If the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us?  And where are all the wonderful deeds that our ancestors told us about?”      

Okay, so I admit it.  I was whining.  But he lets me get it all out.  Then he looks at me full in the face, ignoring everything I said, and orders, “Go in this power of yours and deliver Israel.  I commission you!”

Me? Me?  What power? See, I didn’t have the gift of sight to see what he was seeing.  I’d always seen myself as a loser – a chump. What did I ever do to make the Lord think I could deliver Israel? And I told him so! 

 I mean we may be descended from Abiezer and Manasseh and Joseph the deliverer of Israel and all that, but, remember – even way back in Joseph’s time, when our great ancestor brought his two sons to his father Israel – who had even wrestled with an angel (Gen 32:28)! Well, when Joseph brought him his two sons – our family’s ancestor was the one who got passed over for his younger brother and got the lesser blessing!  

*Father Israel announced Ephraim was going to be greater and become a multitude of nations and our ancestor Manasseh was just going to produce a lesser people – so what can I say?  That’s history! (Gen 48: 17-20).  What could I do but tell him he had the wrong guy?  My clan – the one with the second-rate blessing - has always been the weakest one in Israel and I was the runt of the family.

What I was wondering was, why didn’t this warrior go to the people of Ephraim – the other half of our tribe?  The better half!  The one that got the better blessing?  They’ve got all the talent – they had all the breaks from day one!  What can God expect from me?

You know what this spokesperson of God said to me? “I’ll be with you.  We’re going to do this together!”

Okay…yeah, right.  That’s what I was thinking.  How do I know this isn’t some kind of ruse people have always been pulling off on my family, leaving us holding the bag.   I mean I can see me standing there with my hired hands and a few courageously foolish relatives and here come the Midianites roaring off the desert. yelling: “Get that chump!”

And me, looking all around wildly, “Hey, where’s the prophet?  Where’d he go?  Run!”

So, just to make sure we were on the same piece of papyri, and we were really going to do this together, I asked him to stick around while I scurry and get us some lunch.  I figured, if he wasn’t going to stick around that long, then I wasn’t going to hang around either!  I had wheat to process!

So, I asked him to wait, while I rustled up a meal of goat meat and unleavened bread for us and when I got back with it – not only was he still there, but I got a huge surprise. 

He told me to put the meat and bread on a rock, pour the broth on it.  Then he touched it with the staff he was carrying, and fire came bursting out of the rock, burning up the meat and bread and then – this guy disappeared!   He was no prophet or earthly warrior.  I realized he was an angel from the Lord!  

I even wondered if this angel I was talking to was the one who had wrestled all night with our Father Israel, because he was certainly giving me the order to fight!

Then everything happened fast.  First I dropped down on the ground and shouted out to the Lord to spare me because I didn’t want to die.  But God filled me with assurance that that wasn’t what God was intending.  I really did have a commission.  I really was going to deliver my people.

That night I got my next commission.  God told me to chop down my dad’s altar to Baal and the fertility pole to Asherah the goddess that he had next to it. 

Eeeeee!  This was sticky. I mean I was really scared.  This was dad’s property, not to mention that we were surrounded by neighbors who were worshipping Baal and Asherah to keep the peace and they were NOT going to take very kindly to this! 

But, what could I do? I’d been ordered by an angel! So, I got ten guys I could trust, because this thing was big and heavy, and we waited until pitch dark and then we did it.  We toppled down that altar of Baal and broke it all up.  Then we chopped up that pole and built a proper altar of stone to the Lord God.  Then we dumped the wood from the pole on the altar, rustled my dad’s second-best bull out of the corral, and we sacrificed it on that altar.

Well, it all broke loose the next morning.  Everybody was shocked and scandalized.  Who would do such a thing?  And at such a precarious time?  

All through the day, they searched for the perpetrator, questioning everyone carefully.  It was a manhunt like I’d never seen.

Of course, I worked through my options: I could run, but flight is the clearest admission of guilt.  I could deny everything or try to put it off on somebody else, but that would be a lie before heaven – and heaven is what got me into this situation in the first place!

*Or I could just keep working on the wheat like everything was normal and just see what happened.  And that’s what I did.

All day long they kept up the interrogations.  Look, I’m not stupid, I wasn’t stepping forward, but you can’t keep ten guys quiet.  And, as soon as the word got out, everybody was calling for my head. 

By that time, I was back home.  Night was closing in again and they had lit torches up already.  When they amassed in front of our house it looked like a bonfire and they were all burning mad.

They were shouting for my dad to turn me over to them: “Bring out your son!  He must die!”

And then my dad came out, surrounded by all the warriors of our family he could muster – old campaigners and the young and eager.  Dad stalked right up to the leaders and faced down the whole pack of them.

Calling for silence, he shouted at the crowd: “Are you people pleading Baal’s cause?  Humph!  Are you trying to rescue him?  I’ll tell you what, we’ll kill anyone of you that tries to fight for Baal!  By morning, you’ll be dead!  If he really is a god, then let him fight for himself and for his own altar!”

And I think that was the moment that everybody suddenly realized that Baal had done squat for us so far!   After all, the name “Baal” is just the general label for all the gods of this land of Canaan.  Sort of a catchall deity – and that includes the god of Midian – because, like I told you – our nation got waylaid by Midianite women when we camped at that Acacia Grove outside of Moab during our long trek to Canaan and these Midianite hussies got our guys sinning by worshipping the Moab Baal of Peor (Gen 25:3).  And what happened to those guys?  God ordered Moses to kill every man who had worshipped Baal (Gen 25:5)! And Baal came to nobody’s rescue!

So, what are we doing now worshiping the god of our long-term enemies - the Midianites?  How is their god going to deliver us from its own people?  How dumb can you get?

Well, the whole mob suddenly began to melt away.  They’d had a reality check.  They were Israelites and dad made them realize it was time to choose between the God of Israel and the god of our enemies.  They chose right.

My dad, the get along guy, he did this! He did it for me…

I got a nickname out of this incident: “Jerub-Baal” – “Let Baal fight with him!”  So, I could see it was time to fight.

And just like that, I was filled with God’s power – just as the angel had said.  I sent out the call to fight and all our family – all the descendants of Abiezer – and then all our tribe of Manasseh and even warriors from three other local Israelite tribes - Asher, Zebulon, Naphtali – came massing up to fight with us.

At the same time, word spread out to the Midianites and they and their buddies the Amalakites and the rest of their mob massed up against us.  So, it was war!

And then I did something I’m not proud of, so I’m going to say this briefly.  I asked God for one more sign.  I know, I know!  After all this, I still needed reassurance?  Well, the power wasn’t in me naturally.  I knew that.  I just wanted to make certain it was going to be there when I needed it.

What I did sounds really dumb, I realize that, but I just worked with what I had on hand at the time.  I had all these guys milling around me anxious to go and I just grabbed the first thing I could think of: I threw a blanket down on the ground and asked God to make it wet and the ground dry.  And then, when that happened, I did it again the other way.  And, okay, God was patient with me and did it both ways for me. So, I was ready to go!

And then it turned out God wasn’t ready to let us go!  God then gave me God’s own sign - which I hadn’t asked for!  God took away my whole army of 30,000 guys and left me with just one percent of them:  three hundred of the bravest and dumbest looking in the whole lot – no offense guys. 

You know, asking for signs is not that hot an idea – it can cut both ways!  Better just to trust the Lord from the start.

Why did God do that?  Just so we knew who really was going to win the battle.  Hint? It wasn’t us!

And what about the battle itself?  You know, I don’t have all that much to say about it.  That’s because I didn’t do all that much! 

We were mustering our army – actually eliminating our army over at the Spring of Harod.  So, when God finally had us all pared down, the 302 of us crept over the mountains and peered down toward the foot of the Hill of Moreh and there across the valley stretched out the vast army of Midianites and their allies, disappearing into the distance as far as the eye could see.  It was terrifying. 

 But that night God asked me if I was too scared to attack.  God knew the answer already.  I was!  So, God told me to go down with Purah, my right hand guy, and simply listen to what the Midianites were saying.  So, as the dark night thickened, we edged our way down the hill to the outskirts of the camp, disguised and vigilant. 

The first voices we heard were troubled ones.  A soldier had awakened from a dream about a loaf of bread crashing into the camp and demolishing a tent.   “Uh oh,” his friend cried, “that must be the sword of Gideon!” The friend jumped up from where he was sitting at the fire, glancing wildly about and shrieking, “God has given the Midianites and the whole camp into Gideon’s hands!”

Well, I didn’t miss the significance of that dream.  A loaf of bread?  I’d been grinding flour for bread when God called me!

So, Purah and I charged right back up the hill, posted three companies of a hundred men each in three perches around the camp with trumpets and jars and - at the signal – all 300 of us made a ruckus – blowing the horns, busting the jars, waving torches and shouting, “A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!”

The whole enemy camp went berserk, everybody tumbling over everybody else, many of them slashing each other, thinking they were us, others tearing off across the desert, camels colliding, fires scattered about, tents ripped down and burning.  If we had posted ourselves down in the valley, instead of on this mountain, we’d have all been trampled!

So, I sent messengers out to our allies to pick up on those who escape and ambush them at the Jordan River.  It was a complete rout!

So, they may call me the hero of the day, but, when it was all over, and they asked me to be their king, I refused. “The Lord will rule over you,” I told them all.  I didn’t have any illusions about what happened.  But I did learn a life-changing lesson and I pass it on to you.

You may not have all the talent.  You may not be from the best family.  You may not have gotten all the breaks in life.  But, when you let yourself be empowered by the Lord God, you’re a warrior and you too can move from chump to champ.

Because that’s my true story.

Thank you.

Amen!

Bill in Gideon’s name

Spanish Is a Living Tongue

 

sign in Buenos Aires, photographed by Aida Besancon Spencer August 2025

“Spanish is a loving tongue,” wrote Charles Badger Clark, renowned as the “cowboy poet” and South Dakota’s first poet laureate, in his “A Border Affair” (1907). [1] A beautiful language, it is spoken not only in Spain, but in South and Central America, Mexico, the Caribbean islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic (D.R.), by Sephardic Jews in the diaspora. The second most common language in the United States,[2] Spanish is a universal language spoken across our world.

But the common denominator of a shared tongue does not automatically mean that native speakers can understand each other when they first meet.

As we are writing this post, we are in Buenos Aires to speak at a Christians for Biblical Equality International conference and to meet in person Aida’s digital, delightful, and brilliant Argentinian seminary students. Aίda is a native Spanish speaker, born and reared in the Dominican Republic by a Puerto Rican mother and Dutch father and, thus, fluent in Spanish, English (and a smattering of Dutch). But, since her vocabulary and accent are Dominican Spanish, not Argentinian Spanish, she finds pitfalls here in communicating when words that even spell the same way may mean something completely different.

For example, suppose we are in a restaurant in the D.R., just having enjoyed a full plate of one of the island’s special dishes of rice and beans and chicken and fried ripe plantains, with a fresh avocado just off the tree on the side, topped off with dulce de leche (a milk-based hard gel with a fruit center), and washed down with chinola (passion fruit) juice, so we can’t stuff anything more in. What do we do? We ask the wait staff for a factura and receive our bill for the meal. Ask for a factura in Argentina, however, after a fabulous big steak dinner with all the trimmings, and we’d be shocked to discover we’ve just extended our meal with another course as they serve us their delicious pastry, named with the same word. 

Or, again, after we’ve paid our bill, and commenced digesting all those delicacies we just consumed and waddle out onto the island of Hispaniola to discover the Dominican Republic is now basking in the sub-equatorial sun, we may decide to ask for a guagua, since it’s high noon and we may want to take refuge in a bus from the hot rays. Often these autobuses (as they may also be called), both large and small, have Christian slogans spread across their back windows, entreating Jesus for safety. This is a very good idea, since Dominicans often drive at breakneck speed, swerving through Santo Domingo and environs, constantly blowing their horns. In Buenos Aires, however, we don’t ask for a guagua to help us get home, we ask for a colectivo, if we want to catch a bus. And these don’t blow their horns. They advertise “Mision Buenos Aires” on their backs. Since Argentines obey traffic lights but few observe crosswalks or believe pedestrians have right of way and colectivos forge on with determination, we end up running our meal off as we dash across all the streets without traffic lights.

Further, we missed out on strawberry ice cream for a few days, not recognizing “frutilla” (fresas elsewhere). We also didn’t realize peaches (melocoton in the D.R.) were duraznos here. Grapefruit (toroña in the Caribbean) is pamelo. But Aída sure enjoyed the huge 16 oz. sirloin steak for 21,000 pesos ($15 US). We were told “hay mas vacas que personas” (there are more cows than people in Argentina). We did not see them, since they were outside the city, with their gauchos.

 Even more confusing than different vocabulary was a different pronunciation. The Spanish language of Buenos Aires has an Italian overlay and cadence. To us ingenues, it sounds like everything has a “ch” sound, for example, instead of alli (meaning “there”) pronounced “a-ya,” it is pronounced “a-cha”; instead of vainilla (vain-i-ya), it becomes “vaini-cha.” Almost every other word appears to be spoken with a “cha!” It is beautiful and melodious, two Romance languages intertwined and intermingled, but almost incomprehensible to these Spanish tourists. We kept saying, “que? (“what?) and “que significa esto? (what does it mean?). Despite our tiresome baffled looks, the Argentines we met graciously and with a smile explained their words so we could understand. They’ve had a lot of practice at this! If Jimmy Durante was still with us, he would feel right at home: “Hot cha cha!”

Of course, this is not a purely Spanish problem. We have a similar problem in the distillation we call “English,” which, as we know, is a kind-of composite language extracted from a German dialect, infused with French from the Norman invasion, salted with Gaelic, and shaken and stirred to produce the linguistic stew which we are now peppering with tech-terms.

So, language changes so much that “native speaker” does not necessarily ensure clear communication in any language in our global, increasingly technological societies.

A common saying for sometime now is that the young across the world are more like each other than they are like their parents because they are all in so much communication that they seem to comprise a new juvenile people group with its own language, its “young-speak.”

With words trying to keep up with technology, the emphasis in routine expression is increasingly invested in staying on pace with the language of mechanics, perhaps at the expense of other essential language functions. But speech is not the only way we convey more tender feelings to those we love.

One of the most moving examples of the non-lingual communication of love is described by the poet king David in Psalm 19:2-4. Here is our translation of what these verses say, “The heavens are telling the splendor of God and the firmament declaring the work of his hand. Day to day pours forth a word and night to night makes known knowledge. There is no speech and there are no words without their voice being heard.”

True, God has spoken to us through the words of prophets and, ultimately, those of the incarnate Christ Jesus, who is God-Among-Us, as recorded in the Hebrew Bible and the New Covenant (or Testament, including the eye-witness testimony about Jesus by those who knew him personally like Matthew, John, his half-brothers James and Jude). But God also speaks to us daily beyond language. The love that God has for us is imparted to us by the beautiful world resplendent around us. In the tranquil as well as the tempestuous sky and earth that envelopes us, God communicates to us the almighty God’s sustaining power. The seasons change, but we did not set them in motion. The oceans’ tides ebb and flow, but we didn’t stir them. The earth spins and moves in its orbit, but we did not set that in place. All of this movement was already transpiring before humans arrived and will continue to pulse and move while God sustains it.

In short: God communicates to us in a multitude of ways through God’s gifts and sustaining actions.

How should we respond to this? We should take a lesson from God and steward the earth by doing our part in creating an environment of kindness through our actions toward one another and the creatures that share this planet with us (as God commanded in Genesis 1:26-30).

In what may appear to be a very small way to extend such kindness, in Buenos Aires, in the place of “fair winds,” it must have been tiresome for Argentines to have to navigate our vocabulary and our accents to acclimate us to the living language in their world. But they invariably did so with grace and kindness and we appreciated the atmosphere they created within their place in the environment God created for us all.

Bill and Aída

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[1]Published in the June 1907 issue of Pacific Monthly and set to  music in 1925 by Billy Simon, Wikipedia, “Spanish is the Loving Tongue,”  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Is_the_Loving_Tongue, for the full lyrics see PoemHunter.co, https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-border-affair/

[2] See Lilata, 10 most common languages spoken in the U.S. (2024), https://lilata.com/en/blog/most-common-languages-in-the-us/

Geometry Inspired by God

  

design by Karl-Dieter Crisman

 

Guest blog by Karl-Dieter Crisman

 Karl-Dieter Crisman is a professor of mathematics and computer science at Gordon College in Massachusetts.  He is grateful for mentors who have inspired him to investigate connections between math and faith ever since a conference in Chicago, sponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, nearly thirty years ago.  Karl-Dieter will be the 2025-26 Brabenec Lecturer of the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences. 

 

I want you to think about something that might seem unrelated to this blog.  Do you remember your high school geometry class?  Think about what you liked, or didn't like, about it.  Yes, this question will be relevant! (If you had calculus at some point, same questions.)  Take some time, the page won't reload before you think about it.

Now consider the following.  Was one of your reactions that studying geometry allowed you to "glorify the Lord's name and greatness”?  If you are like most of my students, the first thing you think of when it comes to mathematics is not God – that's true even if you enjoy math, and I hear that some people don't enjoy it that much.

This post is about a person whose first reaction was that geometry glorifies God, and why that should encourage us to explore creation for its own sake.  But first, some background!

It turns out that there are lots of devout Christians who have contributed to the development of mathematics as we know it and were inspired by seeking God's order in the universe.  Many readers of faith will have heard of the great philosophers Descartes and Pascal, who were both very good mathematicians.  The founders of calculus, Newton and Leibniz, were likewise very devout (though in Newton's case not so orthodox).  Leonhard Euler, easily the greatest mathematician of the 18^th century, went so far as to publish a defense of the divine nature of Scripture right in the midst of Frederick the Great's Berlin, which was more interested in Voltaire's wittiness than revelation!  But I think none of them compares with an obscure figure from the early 1300s, when it comes to being motivated by God in pursuing geometry. 

At that time, the Castilian rabbi Abner, from the city of Burgos in what is now Spain, converted to Catholicism – without any coercion, as far as we can tell.  He became known as Alfonso of Valladolid.  Under that new name, he is mainly known for defending his conversion and disputing in philosophy and theology with other Jews of the time – leading him to be a controversial figure^[1]. 

More importantly for this post, Abner/Alfonso was dedicated to geometry throughout his life.  It is in his one surviving mathematical text that he says that "from [his] youth to [his] old age the one thing [he] desired from the Lord" was to "glorify [God's] name and greatness."  How was he going to accomplish this?  By measuring the circle!

Today, it seems like there are amazing new scientific discoveries every day.  We even allow many people to dedicate most of their lives to exploring God's creation.  But for most of the famous names above, and certainly for Alfonso, math was just one of many tasks on the docket.  So discoveries were fewer and further between.  Alfonso's goal was to reorganize geometry – that is, geometry as it had been for well over a thousand years – by learning how to measure curved shapes.  In fact, he calls his mathematical text the Sefer Meyasher 'Aqov, or Straightening the Curved, in a clear allusion to the prophet Isaiah.  Consider the New Living Bible version of Isaiah 40:4:

Fill in the valleys, and level the mountains and hills.

Straighten the curves, and smooth out the rough places.

I should have a spoiler alert here.  Neither as the rabbi Abner, nor as the convert Alfonso, did he achieve this task.  He did, however, have novel approaches to the problem – ones that seem to foreshadow approaches later taken in calculus for finding the exact length of curves.  Keep in mind that even the circle wasn't really "measured" yet, because while the circle constant pi was known, mathematicians didn't know that much about it other than good approximations such as 3.14 or 22/7 – and wouldn't until nearly 1900. 

Moreover, Alfonso dug deeply into the question of how parallel lines work.  You might remember from that geometry class I asked you about that if you have a straight line and then some other point, you can only make one parallel line to the original through that point.  But how do we know?  Alfonso quoted verses such as Job 38:11 to reinforce his own (imperfect) conclusions about this, which used his ideas about infinity: “This far you may come and no farther: here is where your proud waves halt” (NIV). Alfonso says about these arguments, "From here one can (if one wishes) come near to the understanding of the existence of God."

To be sure, Abner/Alfonso wasn't trying to prove God's existence with his mathematics. Nor was he doing biblical exegesis at length to prove his mathematics.  Indeed, like all of us, he had his own blinders.  He was so convinced of his parallel lines that he, like all other geometers of the time, did not realize that if you lived on a curved surface, you can have more than one parallel line through a point – or none!  The former case is crucial to how a GPS navigation system works using Einstein's general relativity – a theory which he based on the geometric discoveries of Bernhard Riemann, another devout mathematician.

But God doesn't ask for us to be able to comprehend his creation fully; to reference Job again, he is pretty clear that we can't, and we won't. Instead, God asks for us to understand that which we can in humility, and that we should meditate on "whatsoever things are true [or]… of good report" (Phil. 4:8 KJV).  Alfonso makes it clear that geometry is one of those things, and with quotes from Deuteronomy to Ecclesiastes justifies learning for its own sake, since God created “everything for his honor and majesty” (see Psalm 96:6).

Alfonso believed that even on this topic one should “seek to find the right words to acquire a clear knowledge, emanated from the Holy Spirit.” Let's keep that in mind in an increasingly utilitarian culture – that God respects all our attempts, incomplete as they inevitably are, to comprehend the majesty of creation.

 

Note: All quotes from Abner/Alfonso are from the excellent translation and commentary "Alfonso’s Rectifying the curved—a fourteenth-century Hebrew geometrical-philosophical treatise" by Ruth Glasner and Avinoam Baraness.  Some of these ideas were presented in a more scholarly context in a paper for the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences^[2].

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[1] See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abner-burgos/ for an introduction.

[2] See https://pillars.taylor.edu/acms-2024/20/.

 

 

 

How Do Pagan and Biblical Temples Differ?

 Holy of holies in the Temple in Edfu, Egypt, photo by Aída Besançon Spencer April 2025

When we think of Egypt, we often visualize pyramids, the Nile River, the Sphinx, and the Hebrew exodus. When Bill and I had the pleasure to visit Egypt and take a Nile River cruise this past March and April, what do you think was the main saying the passengers repeated for each day? “What’s today’s temple?”  We saw different ancient temples daily and the Egyptologist (our tour guide) kept implying correlations to the Old Testament tabernacle and to Christianity.

The Egyptian temples that we visited had been built from 4000-5000 BC to as late as AD 50. In one of the latest ones, in Edfu, Egypt, built between 237 to 57 BC, our guide repeatedly told us about the priest’s procedure to become pure before entering into the god or goddesses’ presence, for example, in this case, Horus, the avenging falcon god. The priest had to pluck off all his hair and immerse himself in water. Like many other temples, this temple had in the deepest room a holy of holies. In these Egyptian temples, only priests were allowed inside the entire temple.

You may remember that the Israelite tabernacle (or tent of meeting), and the later temples, also had a holy of holies. The Hebrew tabernacle (constructed ca. 1450 BC during the Exodus from Egypt)[1] had a court, a holy place, and, behind a curtain, a holy of holies. Only the high priest could enter the holy of holies once a year to seek the forgiveness of sins for himself, his family, and all of Israel. He had to make animal sacrifices, bathe in water, and wear a sacred tunic. Inside the holy of holies was the ark of the covenant with two carved cherubims, and later the Ten Commandments and other symbols of God’s historic presence in their lives (Exod. 37:1-9; Lev. 16; Heb. 9:1-5). However, all the people were allowed in the court and could see the offerings in the holy place and participate in prayer.

Of course, the pagan temples revered many mythic gods and goddesses, while the Israelites worshiped only one living God, not represented by any statue or form. Moses is very firm in Deuteronomy 4 when he warns the Hebrews: “Since you saw no form when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire, watch yourselves closely, so that you do not act corruptly by making an idol for yourselves in the form of any figure: the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth. And when you look up to the heavens and see the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the host of heaven, do not be led astray and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples everywhere under heaven” (4:15-19 NRSV). Many ancients were conscious of the powers all around them and personified them into a variety of creatures and personages, while missing the Great Power behind them all, the living God who loved them dearly.

What we learned in our travel to these temples is that God has placed in people across many ages and nations the desire to be accepted, purified, and assisted by the Creator of the world. Both the pagan and Jewish believers through their liturgy had been presupposing the great holiness of the Deity. Even the pagans had recognized that some separation existed between God and humanity.

However, a key change occurred in the first century, recorded in the Gospel of Matthew. When Jesus finally breathed his last, “behold the curtain of the sanctuary [in Jerusalem] was torn in two, from top to bottom, and the earth shook, and the rocks were split” (Matt. 27:50-51). Jesus had fully purified and justified humans before God, now, God’s Spirit could no longer be contained behind a curtain or division. This phenomenal gift can only be embraced if Jesus is trusted to enable each believer to become acceptable to the great pure sovereign Lord of the universe.

Jesus has freed humanity! After Christianity came to Egypt, no more temples came to be built because the Christians taught that the holy of holies had transferred from a place for select high priests now to a presence among everyday believers. All of us are one body, which is the holy place of the Holy Spirit among us (1 Cor. 6:19). All repentant believers become justified but must then maintain out of gratitude their holiness in thought and action. We are not justified by our actions but by God’s grace to seek to become mature priestly followers of the crucified and risen Messiah (1 Pet. 2:5-6).

Yet, how many of us still envision the “holy of holies” to be the pulpit and the person preaching to us is the “high priest” and the sanctuary seats the “holy place”? We forget that where two or three of us gather together (Matt. 18:20) we now have God’s holy and moveable temple or tent because the triune God is with us.

Aída

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[1] 1450 BC is the traditional date for the Exodus according to Samuel J. Schultz, The Old Testament Speaks, 4^th ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 49. A fragmentary hieroglyphic inscription contains possibly the first mention of “Israel.” “Does the Merneptah Stele Contain the First Mention of Israel?” Biblical History Daily, May 20, 2025. https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/ancient-cultures/ancient-israel/does-the-merneptah-stele-contain-the-first-mention-of-israel. The Merneptah Stele was inscribed by King Merneptah 1213-1203 BC.