Just Do It

This is Nike's famous motto, but it also describes what Jesus expects of His followers when he says something. Jesus meant what he said and he' s talking to us. Too often we complicate it, though. If Jesus says, "Love your neighbor", we say, "Who is my neighbor? I need to go study about this so I can interpret just what Jesus is talking about".

The Danish theologian, Soren Kierkegaard said it this way:

"Imagine that it says in the New Testament that it is God's will that every human being is to have $100,000. Do you think we would need a commentary or bible scholar to help us interpret that? I wonder if everyone would not say: This is easy enough to understand; no commentary is needed...But what stands in the New Testament (about the narrow way, about dying to the world, and so on) is no more difficult than this matter of $100,000. The difficulty lies somewhere else, in its not pleasing us - and therefore,therefore, therefore we must have commentaries and professors and more commentaries. We are not "running the risk" of its becoming ambiguous - no, that is precisely what we want, and we hope that little by little with the cooperation of commentaries, it will become ambiguous.

We have invented scholarship in order to evade doing God's will. This much we certainly do understand - that face to face with God and his obviously understood will to say "This I will not do" - this no one dares to do. We do not dare do it that way, so we protect ourselves by making it seem as if it were very difficult to understand and that therefore we study and investigate etc., that is, we protect ourselves by hiding behind big books". OUCH!