God and Spiders

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  I hope anyone reading this enjoys it and is given occasion to ponder, for pondering is praying when we ponder our God of love.

Yesterday, I wrote about my golden silk orb weaver, Aragog. Today I will write about how one American Christian worked the metaphor of the spider into a famous sermon, and then I would like to share my own metaphor.

Spiders figure prominently in at least one American writer whose sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" was said to have been so powerful many who heard it fell onto the floor.

Really?  It was the so-called Great Awakening.

Well, I have read it on numerous occasions.  I am an English teacher, afterall, and the sermon is included in the 11^th grade English textbook for American literature.

 Jonathan Edwards wrote it and preached it.  I suppose it is the sign of our times, and science, that I can read his sermon, admire his writing style, but disdain his message.

I did fall to the floor laughing the first time I read it.

Edwards actually says that God, our God, our God of love, “Abhors you.” 

Think about that. Abhor is a strong word.  God does not just hate you, but God really really really hates you, me, and everyone else who has ever been born.

Now, unless Edwards expanded on that idea elsewhere, I must believe he meant it.

His primary metaphor was that of the spider, being dangled by God over flames, into which God would drop the poor creature because, like my daughter and Ronald Weasley, God loathes spiders. 

It is the image of many of my brothers and sisters: the God who is inhumane and cruel, who created eternal fired up concentration camps for anyone who does not follow the correct doctrine some ignorant person imagined centuries ago.

Ahem.

Let me say this: if there were no Christianity and all we had was the Jewish Bible, I believe such a doctrine is truly justified. 

Of course, there would be Jewish teachers over the centuries, such as there were before Jesus lived, who would teach that Jehovah is a God of love.

Maybe the idea would have caught on.  It struggles to do so today, still. 

The doctrine certainly drives hearts among many Jewish people today, although the rabbi we Christians seek to emulate surely has had some influence on that.

I can’t imagine that a Jewish person, or any devout person, would want to be upstaged by a sect from their own religion that peaches the greatest news, the true gospel, that God loves us, and we must love God, love God’s creation, and therefore love all men and women. 

In history, religious groups are changed by those who split off from them.  So even without Jesus the truth that God is love would have existed within Judaism, but certainly with Jesus all religions have been affected. 

However, without that gospel, I can see how someone could read the Jewish Bible and conclude that God hates men and women.

God thinks we are dirty, defiled, unclean,unkosher—especially us Gentiles—you know…like spiders.

Dropping a sinner into a fire is as easy for God, right?

Of course, according to Edwards’ Calvinism, it is God’s love that saves some of us, the elected ones, from God’s hatred. 

That metaphor stinks to high heaven.  It should be dropped into a fire.

Next time, I will share another metaphor about spiders that is more Jesusy, more like good news.

Blessings…