No Stone Unturned (almost)

Picture taken in Carmel, CA July 2011, these are not stones I would want to touch much less turn over! Birds are fascinating, bird poop, not so much.

In the first installment of my topical study of stones in the Bible I optimistically and perhaps in a cavalier manner stated that I would leave "no stone unturned" implying that I would look up every reference to stones in the Bible. Well...I may actually leave at least a few categories of stones unturned.

In Rick Warren's Bible Study Methods, Twelve Ways You Can Unlock God's Word, Warren says, "Be thorough. As far as possible, find and study every verse that relates to the topic. The only way to know everything God has said on a topic is to go through the entire Bible and find all the passages on that topic." Hmm. According to Zondervan NIV, Nave's Topical Bible there are about 58 separate references (more verses) on the literal use of stones. There are about 21 verses on the figurative and symbolic use of stones.

There are additional references for precious stones and also many, many references for stones used for stoning people. For this reason, and I hope Rick Warren won't mind, I will limit my study to the literal, figurative and symbolic stones and will omit the precious stones and stones used for stoning people. My study will include stones used for building, stones used for remembering events, stones that can cause someone to stumble and stones that in some way describe Christ or the Spirit.

This week I was particularly "struck" (no pun intended) by the stones that are used to mark occasions that are to be remembered, the topical Bible calls them Memory Pillars. In Genesis 28:18-22 Jacob took the stone that had been near his head while he slept and dreamed and set it up as a marker. He poured oil on top of it and named the place Bethel. Jacob then made a vow that if God would protect him on this journey and would bring him back safely then the Lord would be Jacob's God. God has just given Jacob a dream of the stairway with angels walking up and down from earth to heaven. God has  promised in the dream to give Jacob the land he has been sleeping on. Initially the vow sounded to me like second guessing God and also, are we allowed to make these kinds of deals with God? The New Bible Commentary* says that "as long as the votary
 performs his vow, the Old Testament does not discourage them...Vows are not necessarily bargaining with God, rather they can express our dependence on him. Nor was Jacob's vow here an expression of unbelief in the promises just made to him, for all petitionary prayer is based on God's promises to provide for our needs (Mt. 6:11 with 6:25-34)".  I really like it when the commentary actually answers the questions that I have!!

Many of my prayers lately have been based on God's promises to provide. Jesus told us to pray: "Give us this day our daily bread..." I am so tempted to pray for tomorrow's bread and next month's bread. And I want to see tangible results. Jacob wanted more than just his extraordinary dream. He wanted something in the waking world to signify God's promise and provision. He took the rock that had been beside his head during that remarkable dream and he poured oil over it. I tried to think of how I could pour oil over my requests before God. I've been in a church service where we wrote our prayer requests on a piece of paper and then walked up to the altar and put them up on a wall. I've heard of people writing sins on a piece of paper and then burning the paper to symbolize the confession and turning from the sin. We as people seem to need something we can touch, see, read or hold, something tangible. My desire is that God's Word, His promises would become as real to me as the stone by Jacob's head was to him, that Jesus and His saving grace would be such a big stone of faith that nothing could move it. I hope that by meditating on God's Word and His promises it will be as if I were pouring oil over my little stone of faith. May my stone of faith grow larger every day and be so real that I can reach out and touch it.


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*I will take a moment to express my thoughts on commentaries. I like them! For those of us without formal theological training and with limited time they can be a great tool. I do not think commentaries can be substituted for scripture, nor do they carry the weight of scripture, nor are they definitive. They are a tool. Sometimes when I read scriptures that confuse me I will ask God to help me understand the difficult passage in the way He intended it. I will ask for wisdom. Sometimes I will get a new insight or suddenly see the passage in a new way but sometimes I simply do not have the knowledge (culture of the time, Greek language, Hebrew language) to get the true picture. At those times I benefit from the writings and knowledge of others; always remembering that the words of others (even brilliant scholars) are not scripture. One of the questions I always ask when reading what someone else has written about the Bible is: "Does this make sense with regard to other things that the Bible says?, Is it consistent with what I already know about God and His character from the Bible?".