Dangerous Territory by Amy Peterson

Author:Amy Peterson
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: spiritual hero, english teacher, God's will, southeast asia, christian service, cambodia, surrender, memoir, missionary
ISBN: 9781627076388
Publisher: Discovery House
Published: 2017-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

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The word translated “high places” (bamah) is repeated 102 times in the Old Testament, mostly referring to Canaanite places of worship, altars on mountaintops and under “every luxuriant tree” (1 Kings 14:23). As I sat on the roof of my building that night, I thought about those “high places” and chuckled to myself, making little jokes about my penchant for high places, jokes that perhaps only the Christian-school educated would catch.

When the Israelites prepared to enter Canaan, Moses exhorted the Jews to “demolish all their high places” (Numbers 33:52). It was hundreds of years, though, before young King Hezekiah actually put an end to idol accommodation in Israel. Since the reign of Solomon, thirty kings (twelve in the southern kingdom of Judah, eighteen in the northern kingdom of Israel) had failed to remove the high places. But Hezekiah enlisted the help of the Levites and made sure the high places were destroyed, and that true, God-centered worship was restored in the temple (2 Chronicles 29–30).

The Jewish temple had a high place, a bimah, of its own, a raised pulpit from which the Torah was read. Scholars are unsure whether bimah derived from the Hebrew bamah or from the Greek word bema, meaning platform. Bema, when found in the New Testament, is usually translated “judgment seat.” I used to hear pastors use the Greek word in sermons: “When you find yourself at the Bema seat,” they’d ask, “what will Jesus say to you?”

It occurs to me now, as I rehash my mistakes, that what I’m doing is not what Jesus would do if I were to meet him at a high place.

It occurs to me now that obsessing over my own failures and what-might-have-beens is a way of creating my own altar, a bamah to me, a high place where I worship myself as the ultimate sovereign, responsible for whatever happens, good or bad.

Mistakes were made. I made mistakes. But obsessing over my mistakes elevates them as more powerful than the sovereignty of God. God is sovereign, and God is good, and God has forgiven me.

It would be at least a year before I was able to believe any of those things again.

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