Lots of water

When I talk about our home, I tend to say that we live in "the dry North" of Benin, and compared to the rest of the country, it is very dry for most of the year. However, for a month or so during rainy season we can get a lot of rain, and usually once a year we get a huge rainfall which is so heavy that the ground can't soak it up as it falls.

This year it was last Saturday. We had plans to go down to Bembéréké to visit a friend who had given birth. There was a huge storm on Friday night, and the rain started again at about 5 on Saturday morning. We thought at first that we would wait until the rain stopped to set out, but as the rain continued steadily and showed no signs of slowing, we decided to set out anyway at 10.

This was what we saw as we headed towards the gate of our compound:



And between us and the road:



There was a lot of water about. We gasped as we saw familiar countryside under water, and as we passed over one bridge and saw part of the riverbank slip and crash into the swirling torrent below.

At this bridge (missing its safety barrier), what is usually a river 4 or 5 metres wide looked more like a lake:



And then we saw a queue of vehicles ahead of us, which is never a good sign! We parked, and Marc got out and walked down to see what was going on. It turned out that a bridge was entirely under water, and the police had sensibly closed it. They said they'd open it again when the water level had gone down, but since it was still raining, we didn't have much hope of that being any time soon, and turned back, disappointed not to have seen our friends. In Europe we'd have tried to find an alternative route, but we knew that we were on the only north-south tarmacked road and if that was blocked, there was no alternative.

Yesterday we heard that later the road had been blocked in a couple of other places, and we were glad we hadn't ended up stuck in between two of these!

Two Gods?

You sometimes hear people talk about "the God of the Old Testament" who they see as an angry God, and "the God of the New Testament" who they see as being full of compassion. Quite apart from the un-Christian idea that there is a different God in each part of the Bible, or even that God might change over time, I'm not sure that these people have been reading the Bible fairly.

I'm reading a book by John Goldingay, and one of the chapters addresses this very question of God's nature. He begins by saying,

"The Bible portrays God as having both a soft side and a tough side. The soft, positive, generous, creative, life-giving, merciful, faithful side of God expresses itself in creating the world, having mercy on it despite humanity's rebelliousness, and acting to restore it to what it was designed to be. The tough, angry, negative side expresses itself in killing people for falsifying their pledges, pouring bowls of wrath over them, and sending them to hell." (John Goldingay, Key Questions about Christian Faith: Old Testament answers, page 12.)

He goes on to say that he has deliberately taken examples of what he calls God's "soft side" from the Old Testament, and examples of the "tough side" from the New Testament. Many people don't even realise that hell isn't talked about at all in the Old Testament. Goldingay goes on to say that he doesn't think that God's soft side and His tough side balance each other out. God's nature is overall merciful, generous and loving, and just occasionally his tough side has to break through.

As I work on Old Testament translation, I am struck again and again by God's amazing patience. His people Israel just keep forgetting all His goodness towards them, and rebel against Him time and time again. And yes, He may get angry and punish them, but always with the intention of bringing them back to Him.

This is summed up by two verses I came across when I was working on Psalm 78 this morning:

"Their hearts were not loyal to him,

they were not faithful to his covenant.

Yet he was merciful;

he forgave their iniquities

and did not destroy them." (Psalm 78:37,38 NIV)

It reminds me of something Paul says in one of his letters to Timothy:

"Here is a trustworthy saying:

If we died with him,

we will also live with him;

if we endure,

we will also reign with him.

If we disown him,

he will also disown us;

if we are faithless,

he will remain faithful,

for he cannot disown himself." (2 Tim. 2:11-13)

I feel very strongly that we need to stop repeating what other people say about God, however sure they may be about it, and however right it might sound to us, and get back to reading God's word in depth and in breadth, so that we might discover who He really is.