Photo and Commentary ©2024 by Shelley Schurch
Sunday, August 25, 2024
Here, for your viewing and linguistic pleasure, is a pair of pears that don’t need to be pared before eating. (My husband, a former college English teacher, always comforts adults learning English as a second or third language with his belief that “English is a crazy language.”)
So, of this trio of words, which shows up most often in our Bibles? I’m thinking it has to be pair. Maybe not the word itself, but what it represents – two of something.
When you think of Biblical pairs, what comes to mind? (I’ll tell you last what I thought of first, and it was because of a song).
My second thought was all those animals lining up two by two to enter Noah’s ark. (Perhaps it should more accurately be called God’s ark, since He designed and gave the blueprints and all the instructions to Noah. But the latter was the general contractor and day laborer, so I’m OK with calling it his ark, too.)
I remember my surprise when I read that not all of the animals entered the ark as pairs; some went in by sevens, as God directed:
You shall take with you seven each of every clean animal, a male and his female; two each of animals that are unclean, a male and his female; also seven each of birds of the air, male and female, to keep the species alive on the face of all the earth. (Genesis 7:2, 3 NKJV)
The next pairs I thought of were all the people that come to mind because they are linked together in Bible stories: David and Goliath, Mary and Joseph, Peter and John, Ruth and Naomi, Cain and Abel, Aquila and Priscilla, Jacob and Esau, Mary and Martha . . .
And the pair I thought of first, Adam and Eve. They are, of course, the first human pair mentioned in the Bible, created by the hand of God, but I wasn’t thinking chronologically when I thought of them. It was a snippet of song that started playing in my head:
The guilty pair, bowed down with care,
God gave His Son to win,
His erring child He reconciled
And pardoned from his sin.
You may recognize these words and be singing along with them. They’re from the first verse of “The Love of God,” music and lyrics by Frederick Martin Lehman. I remember sitting in church as a child, my imagination always stirred up by the last verse:
Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made;
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
That sounded like a lot of love to me! I still had (and have) a lot to learn (and unlearn) about God’s character, but what a wonderful song for a child to hear early on.
And that brings me to the most amazing, most tender, most tremendous pair of all – God and me! God and you! Just us two!
We read about Jesus and Nicodemus, in deep conversation late at night; of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well, who is entrusted with the revelation that He is the Messiah; Jesus and Zacchaeus, who is told to climb down from his tree perch because Jesus is inviting Himself to his house for dinner; and Jesus and the thief crucified next to Him, who pleads for and receives instant, complete forgiveness.
I read about Jesus dealing with all these people, and more, as individuals. Just the two of them. He didn’t insist on a crowd gathering before He’d share precious truth, and offer salvation. Jesus and __________. Enter any name there, but be sure to enter yours first of all, so you can remember with assurance that Jesus died so that you and He could be a pair, forever.