For a while now, my wife's cell phone has been on the fritz. Besides the large crack down the face of mine (which I had been ignoring), her loud speaker had totally stopped working. No speaker phone? What's the big deal about that? Actually the loud speaker also controls the ringer. Her phone would not ring when someone would call. The alarm would not go off (she runs much of her day's routine around the countdown timer). All it would do was buzz.
About a week ago I decided that we just need new cell phones. We had decided a couple of days before against the idea of ditching the cell phones completely and going the home phone only approach because it would only save us like 10 bucks a month (we have a really basic plan by today's standards) and we'd lose a ton of the convenience that comes along with having cell phones. So I bought us new phones, Nokia X2's. They are meant for pre-paid plans, but work great with our T-Mobile sim cards. Among the awesome features not available on our old phones is the capacity to hold an 8 GB micro SD memory card. That's the size of my Ipod Nano, folks. Get the picture? I've got about 800 pictures on my cell phone, and the entire audio Bible (NIV) and still have about 4 GB of free space for music and Pimsleur's Spanish system.
So why do I tell you all this? Well it's going to get weirder.
I have eczema. And so I take baths, in special concoctions that are supposed to help my skin. Tonight is the first night I was able to lay down in a warm apple vinegar spiked bath with my cell phone next to me playing the Bible through the speaker phone. I listened to 1 John, 2 Thessalonians, and a few Proverbs.
There is something so fitting about listening to (or reading) the Bible while in the bath. There are so many allusions in the Bible to bathing/washing with water/baptizing that have to do with cleansing uncleanness, healing the sick, and removing the stain of sin. Chuck Missler, an amazing Bible teacher, calls 1 John 1:9 ("If you confess your sins, He is faithful and just to forgive you your sins and cleanse you from all unrighteousness") the Christian Bar of Soap. In fact the Bible is all about taking something that was dirty and making it clean, taking something that was sick and making it well, taking something that was dead and making it alive.
Jesus was like that. That kind of cat. He believed strongly in resurrection. In purification. In cleansing. In the renewing of the clean and the judgement of the unclean. He was baptized in the Jordan, but if you'll notice, in many of the Old Testament laws that God gave the Israelites, He included rituals like washing oneself in the river and washing one's clothes and then one will be clean again. The rise of baptism is not surprising in this light, and in fact is something that Jews were doing long before Jesus was born, although not for the same purpose Christians do it today. Submersion in water has always been a symbol of taking something that was unclean and making it clean. Baptism is that symbol today for Christians, although Jesus put a new spin on it and included in the meaning taking something that was dead and making it alive through resurrection.
In response to the critique from an atheist that giving yourself over to reading the Bible and learning Christian doctrine is in essence brainwashing yourself, I once heard someone say, "My brain needed a good washing anyway." How true is that for us? I know that after some of the things I have done/seen/subjected myself to this week, that my brain needed a good washing too. Thank God that He provided us the tool in His Word to cleanse ourselves from all of the crap we put into our heads each day. To renew and refocus ourselves on the truth, the only solid foundation. And baths seem all of the sudden like the perfect place for it.
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