Bulletin Articles
“For the Trees”
Categories: Iron sharpens ironThere’s an irritating dichotomy that we all have to deal with, every day of our lives, whether we realize it or not. I’ve been thinking about it lately in physical terms, because my family just bought a property that needs a lot of work. My wife and I have made list upon list of changes to make, and at the time, each item seems minor—but then my obsessive attention to detail kicks in, and what seemed like a one-hour project turns into a full day or more. So far, we’re always happy with the results, but we’re certainly not breaking any speed records. I end up frustrated, because the big picture isn’t taking shape as quickly as I would like. In truth, this is probably just a good exercise for me in developing better patience and efficiency, but it has brought into focus the choice that we all have to make many times each day: will I focus my efforts on the big picture, or the minute details?
Perhaps finding a good balance in our everyday lives will be beneficial, but as so often happens, the lessons that we learn in the physical world can help us see what’s happening behind it, in the spiritual realm. In Matthew 23.23, Jesus says, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others. You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!” The problem is more than simple neglect of particular commandments. In the first case, Jesus calls justice, mercy, and faithfulness “the weightier matters.” In the second, the difference between the sizes of the unclean animals being (metaphorically) consumed is comically exaggerated to make the point—they’re focused on the small things, to the extent that they have completely missed the big picture.
That doesn’t mean they should’ve deliberately ignored the herbs and spices they grew when they counted out the tithe, or that they should’ve left the gnats in their drink—only that it was worse to fail in the grand scheme of things, than it would have been to have a handful of accidental oversights to their accounts.
Since the law of Moses is a bit foreign to us, perhaps it’s easier to use a more modern analogy, making use of the expression, “the big picture,” that I’ve already used three times above. In the digital world, pictures are made up of vast numbers of tiny pixels, each of which is assigned a very specific color (one of 16 million even in the most common compressed format), and placed in a very specific location in relation to all the rest. Even my phone has a 12-megapixel camera, which means any given picture I take has roughly 12 million little dots. That’s 192 quadrillion values each pixel could be, and a practically infinite number of ways they could be arranged—and even that would present a compressed image, which is to say a slightly distorted approximation of what the sensor actually saw, which in turn was also a slightly distorted approximation of the reality in front of the camera. The point is that obsessing over each infinitesimal pixel may mean you end up with a high degree of accuracy…but you’d never in your life be able to cover the entire picture that way. You’d end up with a highly accurate little speck, while completely missing…the big picture.
Yet, at the same time, significant errors in even a small number of pixels stand out on the finished product, and our eyes can detect them, and focus in on them accompanied by silent judgment of whoever edited the photo. This is only a rough analogy for the task facing us spiritually, but I think it frames the challenge pretty well. God wants our lives to form a certain “picture”—essentially, we ought to look like Christ. And throughout our lives, we expend untold effort over years or decades trying to get each little dot as perfect as we can; yet, we’re in danger of completely failing, if we spend all of our time on a handful of small points, while excluding the rest of the picture.
Put this way, it’s slightly terrifying to think how many different ways we could fail to live up to God’s expectations, and how few ways there are to present a complete picture to him that is close enough to his standard to be acceptable. If we spend our entire lives perfecting and tweaking a particular practice or belief—be it an element of worship, a complex moral issue, an exegesis of a particular text, a fine point of theology, soteriology, christology, ecclesiology, epistemology, eschatology, or any other arcane -ology that strives to accurately describe and inform, but means almost nothing to our everyday lives—if we spend our entire lives on one or two of these, what good is it, if on the day of judgment the Lord tells us we’ve missed the big picture?
On the other hand, if we take the general approach and worry only about the major, life-shaping, and obvious, and reassure ourselves that the big picture is “close enough,” what good is it, if the Lord holds us responsible for relaxing one of the least of his commandments (Mt 5.19)?
Mercifully, God has given some pointers to keep us from despair. Jesus tells us, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Mt 22.37-40), and “whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets” (Mt 7.12). Paul tells us, “the commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,’ and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Ro 13.9-10). And yet both of these, and the the rest of the Apostles and New Testament authors, also give us ample commentary on a large number of the minor points, too. The big picture ought to be our smell-test, a gauge we consult carefully and frequently, but that helps us to identify which parts of the picture need our attention, using simple questions, easily answered most of the time: does this behavior or belief reflect love? Does it look like Christ?
We have to live from day to day among the small decisions, the infinitesimal little dots that make up the big picture, and we ought to be careful to conform each of them to God’s standard to the best of our ability. Then, we need to reassess the big picture, and move on to the next area that requires our focus. We won’t ever really finish the task in this life, but that’s ok. The process, as much as the product, is the point.
There’s another expression in English, “to miss the forest for the trees,” that conveys the same problem we’ve been discussing. Perhaps it’s even a better representation, because the forest is so much more complex than the sum of its trees. Ideally, the countless small factors of a dozen different systems add up to a beautiful forest, but just a few of them being improper or less than ideal can leave the forest ratty and troubled. It’s a mistake to ignore the trees, or the water, or the wildlife, or soil, air, drainage, etc. in favor of the overall image of the forest as a whole; but it’s a tragedy to focus on making one tree what it ought to be, while the whole forest is in flames. In our spiritual lives, “we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ep 6.12). This is the biggest picture there is. Let’s do our best to play our parts, to faithfully execute God’s instructions without omission or oversight, “so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming” (1Jn 2.28).
Jeremy Nettles
