Advent Series | What Is Real Hope? With Dr Karl Kutz

Oh yeah. Welcome back. MU Talks, your favorite podcast on the planet, coming to you from Portland, Oregon. That utopian coming to you from the beautiful campus of Multnomah University with your friends Aline, Renee, Rob, and a special guest.

Special guest today. Thank you, Rob, for that introduction. And today I'm going straight to Renee to introduce something that is going to happen starting today.

Well, it's Advent season and here at MU Talks, we want our discussions to be part of this preparation time. Advent is traditionally a time when Christians prepare their hearts and minds to focus on and celebrate the arrival of our Messiah. And here at MU Talks, we're going to focus our discussions these four weeks on the traditional Advent topics of hope, peace, love and joy as they meet our everyday life right now in 2021.

Wasn't that beautiful? Wasn't that great? So I am very excited today. This is Aline, Rob and Renee together with a very special guest of of M University. He's not a guest at M University as a guest on MU talks. We've had him before. We've had Dr. Cuts before. And I think we're just going in a pure Christian fashion from Easter to Christmas, from Easter to Christmas to have Dr. Cuts. Because if you scroll back through our podcast, you are actually going to hear one of the most inspiring things that I've heard in many years when it comes to Easter and the Passover, where was God at Passover? I mean, that was just beautiful. So I didn't even look back. And I, I'm telling you this from memory. Dr. Carl Carl cuts, after completing his undergraduate work in Multoma 1983. Even though I'm telling you, if you see him, he looks like he's 23. I don't know how he, how he makes it happen. Finished grad graduate work at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in Hebrew and Semitic languages with a minor in Classical Greek. Talk about taking different approaches in life and learning classical Greek. One area of his. Go ahead.

Toasting through I was going to say.

Oh, yeah. Oh, I mean, I'll tell you this. Not only that he took a classical Greek, he wrote the book and the workbook on it. And we're going to talk to you about that. One area of his early research was in the septuagints, particular focused on how the Greek translation of Job reflects the interpretation of the biblical text during the intertestamental period. The for much of the last three decades, he has been refining the instruction of biblical languages and literature in the classroom at Multnomah University. And I am Actually excited to let everybody know. We just launched a wonderful, wonderful certification in Multnomah. Plus on Greek grammar. You can find it@multomaplus.com first course over there. First series of courses that you find a Greek Grammar by Dr. Carl Cuts and Dr. Carl Kurtz.

Welcome.

Welcome to MU Talks.

Thank you very much. Good to be here.

So, Rene, introduce for us today, what are we going to kick off this Advent series with?

Yeah, well, our. Our theme for today is how to find hope, or where we do find hope in the book of Ecclesiastes, which is maybe not the first place someone might go when they're thinking, I'd like to read some verses about hope in the Bible. But Dr. Kutz has a particular love for Ecclesiastes, and so we're really excited to hear for him today. But Ecclesiastes is a place where we get realness. We get realness about life, we get realness about hope. And they come together startling in a startling way and also in a beautiful way.

So we're kickstarting this, this Advent series with Hope. Dr. Cuts, take it away.

Yeah, I've always had a fascination for the book of Ecclesiastes. It just seems like it's the one book that really resonates with society right now and in the midst of lots of conflict and turmoil that has gone on in my own life. And just looking at the circumstances that we have right now, it just seems it's one of the most germane books in the Hebrew Bible and it's often misunderstood. I think a lot of people look at it and think, oh, it's just so skeptical and pessimistic. But the problem is we're reading on the basis of quantity instead of looking at the punchlines, the points that the author tries to make. And because it weaves in and out so much, I like to try and subsume the content of the book with basically three different trajectories that keep coming back over and over and over again that are rooted in four aspects of God's character. So the first issue is basically a temporal check. God says, hey, take a look at your life. Quit looking toward the future and spend some time just looking at the present. I have to confess, I'm not the best applicant of that in the sense of applying it. So I take heart in that admonition over and over again. And it's rooted in, first of all, the character of God as our creator. He's the giver of life, the taker of life, and any just cursory reading of the book is going to find over and over again that God talks about the fact that he gives life. He takes it away any moment. You never know when it's going to come. So if you're always living in light of the future, you don't know if you're even going to see much of the future. It rests in God's hand. And so you have to kind of back up and say, you know what? I'm just going to take today as the gift of God and to enjoy what's there. And that gift of God, peace is the other element that kind of plays into that temporal check in that he repeatedly asserts that he's the giver of good things, that you can't work, you can't harvest, you can't do anything in life without it being a gift from God and being able to recognize that. And so it kind of pulls us back. And I always tend to be somebody that's always looking to the future. It's like, what am I going to do tomorrow? What project am I going to get to? And I really just need to step back and say, you know, I may not get to complete those. I just need to enjoy what God's given me for the moment. The problem with that, because there's always an upside and a downside to each of those elements is that we can easily assume then, just eat, drink, be merry. Tomorrow we're going to die. So, you know, screw it all. And so he also gives us a perspective check. And repeatedly he refers to God as a judge. And he says, look, it might look like the wicked prosper. It might look like there's just complete haphazardness in the world. But at the end of the day, God is a judge. He evaluates the quality of your work. And so it really needs to be something that you're paying attention to in terms of how you're going to live your life. And then the last one that is really, for me, the one that I probably reflect on the most and that might not feel very comforting, is what I refer to as a perspective check or a quality check, if you want, where God says a number of times in the book that he's made things bizarre. And, you know, probably the most familiar passage is the one in chapter three where he talks about there's a season, you know, and, you know, we're always. We don't really know it from the Bible. We know it from the song by the birds. But, you know, wherever you can get it, that's good. And as the passage goes on, he talks about the fact that he's created everything appropriate in its season and that he has placed in the hearts of humanity. Most translations say eternity. It's a Hebrew word that it can mean the distant future, but it means a long time past, long time forward. And it's really talking about life. He preoccupies us with life. And a few verses later he says, and God has done this so that we will fear Him. Like it's supposed to be unpredictable. Because if we spend our whole life looking to ourselves and don't just step back and say, you know what? God's given me these things, I can't guarantee when they're going to come and go. I can't manipulate God. I can't get what I want by being super good or, you know, and I can't assume that I can be super bad and get away with it. I have to recognize that God has intentionally allowed us to go through these times in a way that reflects his care. And I think that gives the only kind of hope that really lasts in a society like this, because you can give intellectual answers to many of these things, but if you don't root it just in the character of God, that He's trustworthy, that he actually cares about you, you know, we know he loves us. Does he like us? I think is an important piece. And so those. Those things about God's character and about the way it shapes the way that we look at our world, I think are what Ecclesiastes has to say. And I appreciate what Renee said, that it's really about being honest about looking at the world, not just sugarcoating it and saying, oh, yes, you know, everything's good, you know. You know, think of all the blessings we have. And, you know, inside we're churning up because we really feel like we need to be honest and say, I'm really struggling, but it's okay.

Yeah, it's a beauty. I've always loved the. The wisdom literature. And so many good reflections from that. I've heard. I've heard someone say that the wisdom literature, you know, the. The proverbs were now one of the Song of Solomon perhaps was written for young men. And prover. There's like an age thing for each of them. Have you heard that? What do you think about that? Is some guy winging it?

I don't. The rabbis always said you had to be a certain age before you read Song of songs. Yeah, right.

Yeah.

33. I'm not sure that's.

No, no.

Okay.

But.

Definitely Proverbs is written like a father figure to a young man, and then it's transferable, you know, to anybody who's growing up. You know, these are the things we value. And I think Ecclesiastes is more just stepping into the reality of life. You kind of have to see life enough before you really resonate with that book.

Yeah.

Perhaps in our current situation or any kind of major crisis, even those who haven't seen a lot of years numerically resonate with it just because the pain. But it takes life before you really feel like you grasp what's going on in the book of Ecclesiastes.

Yeah, I love the book.

You have any questions?

You can go ahead.

Okay. Talking about hope in. In the context of Ecclesiastes, I'm trying to see how would you connect, Even though I really think that we're already. We're already getting some shaping of the idea of hope, knowing that you can live in the moment you have today, you can live in this moment, but also trust in the character of God. So I think hope is already shaping, but in your perspective, connecting more dots. How do you see? How do you see hope? And where do you get hope?

From this book, I think there are at least two elements of hope. One is an invitation to just open your eyes, because the appeal to look at the world and actually see God's gifts is important. I remember a conversation that I had with my PhD advisor, Dr. Michael Fox, and he was always just a very insightful reader of text. Just comes at things in a fresh way. That was always challenging to me. And he wrote a book on characterization in Esther, and I had the privilege of being able to edit that while I was in graduate school and reading through it. He made this observation that a lot of times we look at the book and God's name's not mentioned there. And so, yeah, some people say God's name's not mentioned there. And so God's not there in the sense he's there, but the people are disobedient. God's upset with them. But Michael Fox pointed out that in a sense, the book is inviting us to look for the obvious presence of God in a world where his presence doesn't look like some epiphany or something like that. It's rooted in these coincidences, you know, and there's no question that he's around. And by not mentioning God's name and yet having him so obvious, it invites us to look and to see God. And I think as I look at Ecclesiastes it's kind of the same thing that you're supposed to recognize that the little you have, the plenty you have, it all is a gift from God. And you need to look at it from that perspective. And I think particularly with COVID and the family crises that we have, whether it be financial or whether we're dealing with tension in families, health concerns, we have a tendency to be so preoccupied with them that sometimes we just miss the hope element. We just don't look and we don't see it. And so the reminder to open our eyes is helpful. And then the other part of the book that I think offers hope, and this is more about oppression, injustice, which we feel so much all the time, but particularly I think this year we've all felt it, is that it underscores the fact that God's got it under control. He will deal with things. It might not be in the time frame that we want it to be in. And so we struggle in this world. And God urges us to learn what it means to be people of faith instead of just getting what we want. But that our hope is in God. It's called hope because we can't see it, we can't touch it, we don't have it. Or it wouldn't be hopeful. But that he reminds us that he's reliable and he's there. And his track record in the past is one of meeting his people at some point or another. I get frustrated sometimes because, you know, sometimes God's intervals tend to be a little longer than I'd like. But, you know, he does work in tremendous ways in our lives.

Yeah, I'm really thinking about, especially this Advent season, specifically as you're talking about taking the opportunity to look at where you are rather than just focusing on the future. Although Advent also invites us to look forward to the future. But as far as Ecclesiastes goes and the topic of hope in the context of Advent, I just see this invitation to acknowledge the messiness, acknowledge the pain, the chaos that we. That we see around us, but not let it consume our thoughts. But that Advent is this opportunity to take a step back and say, yes, that is all there. And still. And still God has it under control. And that is where my hope is in. Do you find that there's any particular way that you're able to enter into that? Because that can be a really difficult thing to do. Even as you're reading through Ecclesiastes, as you mentioned, the volume of strife that's in Ecclesiastes can be Distracting to us. So I think that is there a way for us to use this book to remind us to come back in our own time?

I think the best illustration I can give of that is a balance scales. Kind of the old school balance scales, you know, not the bathroom scales.

Platform.

Yeah, the platform which doesn't ever tell us what we want it to say. But I remember when I was in graduate school, graduate school was just a really challenging time in terms of health concerns within family, in regard to intellectual challenges that you face when you're kind of thinking about ideas and figuring out your own faith in comparison to your family. There was a really dark period of time in there where I was just in crisis. It just seemed like all the time I joked about the fact that I wished I hadn't picked the book of job as my dissertation topic and pick something happy and short and could have gotten done in a smaller amount of time. But it was a really challenging period and I felt like every time I turned around, there was some kind of obstacle that was like a rock on that scale. Balance scales. And I had a really good friend at the time. We formed a club. Well, kind of. It was just he and I, so it really wasn't a club. It was just we got together. He was in history of science and was wrestling with faith issues related to his work in the scientific field. And our theme verse was that verse in Mark where the man comes to Jesus says, lord, if you're able, make me clean. He says, if I'm able, all things are possible to him. I believe. He says, I do believe. Help me in my unbelief. So our club was that I believe. I believe. Help me in my unbelief club. All hyphenated. It doesn't have a real good marketability to it. Would need some advertising gurus to help out with that. But that was very transformative because, one, I could be honest. And I think in the midst of looking at hope, sometimes we feel like what we're doing is plastering over the reality of our world. And if that's the kind of hope that we're talking about, I'm really not interested because I want to be able to acknowledge that it's hard. And I don't want to have to compete, pair it against somebody else and make myself feel like I have no ability to endure or cope or to make somebody else feel the same. It just. It's my world and I have to live with it, and it is what it is, and so I can be honest about it. So being able to look at that with that scale analogy over a number of years, I felt like every time I turned around, I saw another rock going on the pan. And it was incredibly difficult, traumatic. And I don't know what changed. There was just a moment in time where it was like I was able to step back and I realized that the pan that I had been looking at with all these rocks was elevated. That when I could step back far enough to see all the things that I knew, that I knew about God, the things that I had confidence in as I was going through my faith struggles, I realized that there was a reason why I believe, there was a reason that I had hope. Not because of the absence of these things, but because of the predominance of the character and presence of God. And I think that's what brings comfort to us that we can be real. We don't have to pretend, but it's okay because God is there. And I think that's a very transformational difference in outlook than what we typically try to do in order to. To posture hope in the world.

I was going to ask a question. I think you just answered it. When was a time when the book of Ecclesiastes kind of came to your rescue or it really became alive to you? So I'll change my question. I'll tell a story, so I'll give you time to think about it. The question will be, what are some of the big ideas that really resonate within you? The story is this. I was 18 and in love and I knew I wanted to marry my wife. And I was from a poor family. So what are you going to do in Canada? We did a job called tree planting where we went up to northern British Columbia, lived in tents, work 30 days in a row, 12 hours a day, you know, get up at 5:00am, going to the bathroom in the woods. Like just a terrible life. Guys trying to throw themselves off cliffs to get disability. Not even a joke. And. And the camp. And so we were all going for this money because you could make 200, 300, even $400 a day. One of the groups next to us had a. They taped a dollar bill on the, on the door of their breakfast room and they would kiss it on the way out every morning. And. And just the futility of life and just like money and the better one handful with tranquility than two with a chasing after the wind and toil and then just desperately missing my wife and being alone. And I remember just while I was out there tree planting on the Side of the mountain all day, 12 hours, I'm just sitting there thinking, I can't wait to get back to my bunk and read Ecclesiastes. And every night I would read it, and it just gave me life, just like the perspective and how off I was, you know, I mean, you had. Sometimes you have to work hard. I get that. And we needed the money, but, man, you don't want to make your life about money. And that was one of the beautiful things that came through the book of Ecclesiastes. You get this guy who's had everything, if it's actually Solomon, which I imagine, and he's had all these things, and he's like, nope, you're not going to find life there. No, you're not going to find life here. You know, as are there ideas in Ecclesiastes that reach out and grab you, that really resonate.

All of them. I mean, I know that's the most.

Academic answer you can have on emu talks.

Yeah, the big idea.

Yeah.

Because I think one of the things that resonates with us most about Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, books like that is that they are such a pastiche of different elements that they resonate with you every single time you read it, no matter where you are. And so, you know, I think when you're looking at a faith crisis like I had when I went to graduate school, you know, then I get to that passage in the end of chapter two, and he's looking, he says, who knows whether the breath of man goes up and the breath of animals goes down? You know, how do I know? And then there are other times you look and you see people who are prospering so much, and you just. It's that struggle, you know, you plant a thousand trees, you get a buck every day.

Yeah.

You know, and you just feel like, where is the justice in the world? And. And so no matter what you're going through, you can. You can find something in that book that's a touch point for your world. And the same thing in Proverbs. You know, it. I. I have never been able to read Proverbs straight through from front to back, because I pretty soon just get overwhelmed with, you know, thought after thought.

Yeah.

It's like a Rolodex.

Right.

I know I'm That. That now dates me, even though I may appear young. I roll a depth.

I don't even think there's a digital equivalent.

No, it's just.

Yeah, it's just. Oh, Instagram.

Yeah.

Or it's like An Instagram or when.

Somebody Instagram feed, like my friend, clicks all the files in your computer and hits open so that you can go, yes, yes. So that kind of thing. But yeah, so you find yourself just inundated with all this stuff. And so it's easier to just read segments of it and to hit a part where you can take some time to reflect. And so it's more like that for me when I read through Ecclesiastes.

So, I mean, the beautiful thing now. Okay, you guys know I'm a youth worker. I do. And I think a lot of times, I think there's so much value in reading the entire scriptures instead of just kind of the passages and the ideas that get hit. I've thought for quite a while that a lot of times the church sort of whitewashes Christianity or we just kind of reduce it all down to Jesus loves us. And then we give our kids at that and that and that and that. And then they leave church and see the real world and see the pain and the problems and the complexity. And they're like, wait, wait, I thought I was the center of the universe. And you're like, well, if you would have read Ecclesiastes and if you would have read Job and if you would have read the minor prophets, you know, maybe. Maybe you wouldn't be having this life crisis right now. Maybe, maybe your worldview would be more aligned with the Scriptures. And so anyways, I find that that's.

Actually most of the people that I talked to over the years that have either completely abandoned their faith or are really significantly struggling with it are not so much struggling with the reality of God, but the. The presuppositions about what the Christian life ought to look like. Right. What a life of faith is supposed to have as an outcome.

Yeah.

And they're disappointed because they've been given a postcard image of it instead of the reality of walking with God. I remember one time there's that passage in the New Testament where Paul talks about, my power is perfected in weakness. And as Christians, we don't really like that verse, if we're honest, because what we really want is we want the postal service to deliver a package to our door. We open it up and there's a Superman suit or a spider. You can pick whichever super.

Which.

Yeah. And we want to be able to put on the suit. And then we want to do good in our. Or do. Well, use an adverb as the linguist coming out. We want to do well in terms of being able to you know, push through our circumstances. But it's all about us. We want God to somehow give us something so we can be successful. And I feel like Ecclesiastes, and some of these books remind us that at the end of the day, you get to the end of the day and you think, how in the heck did I get through this day? And you realize it's nothing but God. And that kind of thing changes the way we view life. And if there was that awareness that it's okay to suffer, it's okay to struggle. Faith is not the absence of struggle. It's not the absence of sins that we wrestle with. I mean, that's all covered by the blood of Christ. It's about the presence of God and his engagement in our world, Incarnation and his incarnation in us as he transforms us.

Rob kicked us out with a. With a great story from his life. And, and if you listen through the seasons, we learn a lot about. About each other through the season of you talks.

Good thing I only come once every year.

Hey, you know, we'll see you next Easter here. Because you're really helping us really think through a little deeper these issues that are going on in key moments of life, meaning when people maybe are paying attention. At Easter, when people slow down, or Christmas, maybe we'll slow down. One of my best friends in college, he. His mother. His mother passed away, but she had brain tumor. And. And that process was really, was really challenging. She was an absolute gem of a woman. I've never met anybody as loving as that person. I mean, she was really.

She.

She kept the whole church together. That's how powerful she was. And then we just discovered that she has a brain tumor in the middle of. Of her fasting. Seven, seven days for our youth group that was leading, and her son was part of that. And so she fell ill. The whole process started. She ended up passing away. I visited her many times, and every time I left that place, I felt encouraged. Even though it was really. It was hard. She ended up passing away. And it was difficult for the. Her church. The whole church was suffering. And I remember I went to visit my friend a few weeks after she passed away. And in the room where she was, there was a little note on the wall, handwritten note by her husband. And it said these three words. God is different. And that hunted, that stayed with me. That. What do you mean different? You had like a thousand questions coming from this whole. God is different. Is it different than they expected? Is different than they imagined? Is different how? I never got an answer for that. But for me, how Ecclesiastes is it truly, is it you. You go through, you know, Isaiah and you hear the stories. You go through some of the, the Old Testament book. You go through, you know, Samson and you know he's killing all this. God is strong and all this. And then you get to this place where this king, this is like full of wisdom. You think the. The most wise person on planet earth. And he does this ridiculous mistakes that you would think, like, what. What's going on? That there's hope for me. If there was, if he made these ridiculous mistakes in love life and all these things, I. I have hope this Christ season for this. But there's different than this. I think the story that I get from Ecclesiastes, and I'm curious about your thoughts, is I learned that God and, and I love how you put it here. The giver of life also brings death. We look at God with, with 50 lens, we just want the good stuff that we think is good about God. But, but Ecclesiastes presents us a wholesome view of the fact that God might be fundamentally different than who I think he is. Your thoughts on this as well.

I love that illustration. God is different. I mean, we're really talking about God being holy, not human. He's other. And that can feel like he's incredibly distant. But in reality, it's very comforting when we. When I ask students what they think of when I mention God's holiness, they usually tell me words like judgment, you know, doom, everything that typically comes to bear is related to punishment and all that. But there's this interesting passage in Hosea, chapter 11. And it starts out, and God says, I'm the one who taught you to walk, you know, like your finger holding up a little child. And that he's taken care of Israel from the time that they were in Egypt. And then they've turned away. They rebelled against him. And he. He ends in the middle, ends in the middle of the chapter with a statement where he says, how can I give you up? How can I abandon you? How can I treat you like Adma? How can I treat you like Zebuim? The cities that were destroyed with Sodom and Gomorrah, because I'm the Holy One in your midst. I am God and not man. And that's a phenomenal verse because he basically says, my compassion is rooted in my otherness. And so when I look at the distance of God, it's frightening on one level, but it's also the very thing that makes God able to step into my world and to change it. And if I could predict the world, if I could manipulate God, he really wouldn't be God. So I really love that, that phrase, God is different. Yeah, that's fabulous.

Concluding thoughts Renee, I'm just thinking about this, this discussion about holiness and otherness and how immediately like you say, I think that I automatically go to just big, can't be, can't be, can't be reached, can't be controlled. All those things that can feel scary. So then in the Advent season, I feel this, this, this comfort in that. Yeah, but it's that otherness that has come near and has shown his commitment to me. It's okay, you know. And so, so in that, in that feeling of that coming near in the incarnation, right up into the mess and the difficulty, that's, that's where the comfort shows up for me. Yeah.

Well, Rob.

Sure.

I mean, I love it. I love it. People should read Ecclesiastes. They should read Job. I have long believed that underdeveloped theological schema is really the problem with the problem of evil. It's people haven't read the whole thing. And because the Scripture is pretty clear about who God is, you may not like it, but it's pretty clear about it. So you need to read it and get a good accurate picture of reality.

Well, we're kicking off our advent series with Dr. Carl Cuts. I am personally have, I've been many times blessed by Dr. Cuts. A few Dr. Cuts actually has a series of courses not just the Greek grammar in Multimod plus. And maybe you want to bless yourself with this Advent series and going to multomoplus.com getting a few courses from Dr. Cuts. Thank you so much Dr. Cuts for being with us. We and, and we do wish you an absolutely wonderful, filled with hope Advent season that we are kicking off today. Renee, any final thoughts? Rob, before you give us the disclaimer, even though today I don't think we need the disclaimer but people need to know.

I don't think so, but we'll put it.

We'll put it. I'm just saying.

Yeah.

That today it was just full of grace. But if people think that this is in any way representing multi university, they are right. But not legally. Not legally. So Renee, any thoughts for the series?

Just excited to look into Advent. This is our star first week, the first week for all of us looking forward into Advent. I love launching into it this way. Thank you so much Dr. Cuts for doing this for us and, and just pouring into us. What? What you have?

Yes.

Cheers.

Here we go. Rob, this is the views of multiple.

The views you've heard in the last few minutes are no, in no way representative of Multnomah University or its affiliates. Please don't sue the school.

What?

Rob said don't sue the school, but have a great, great blessed Advent season.

Sa.