2. What Hushai Knew: People
What Hushai Knew: People
Hushai knew some basic truths about three important areas of life: people, the world, and words. Because he knew these truths and applied them, he was able to outmaneuver both Ahithophel and Absalom. Hushai was an effective communicator.
What did Hushai know about people? He knew that people think in pictures and respond with their hearts as well as their heads. He would have agreed with Pascal’s famous statement, “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.”[1]
What did Hushai know about the world? That the world is a vast theater, always presenting to us the drama of truth that makes it possible for us to learn and teach. In this, Hushai agreed with David, who wrote: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands” (Ps. 19:1).
What did Hushai know about words? That words began as pictures, and that language is metaphorical and helps to build the bridge between the world around us and the world within us. Here Hushai was in full agreement with the prophets, the psalmists, the apostles, and our Lord Himself, all of whom used word pictures to help us see spiritual truth.
Understanding and applying these three truths helps to make possible the miracle that we call communication. Somewhere, columnist Sidney J. Harris wrote, “The two words ‘information’ and ‘communication’ are often used interchangeably, but they signify quite different things. Information is giving out; communication is getting through.” Ahithophel gave out, but Hushai got through. Ahithophel manufactured a conduit, but Hushai painted a picture.
The Mind—Our Inner Picture Gallery
Ponder this fact: we think in pictures even though we speak and write with words. In his book The Human Situation, W. Macneile Dixon wrote:
If I were asked what has been the most powerful force in the making of history, you would probably judge me of unbalanced mind were I to answer, as I should have to answer, metaphor, figurative expression. It is by imagination that men have lived; imagination rules all our lives. The human mind is not, as philosophers would have you think, a debating hall, but a picture gallery. Around it hang our similes, our concepts. . . . Metaphor is the essence of religion and poetry.[2]
Especially lay hold of that one statement: “The human mind is not . . . a debating hall, but a picture gallery.” This doesn’t mean that we avoid arranging our thoughts in a logical manner in order to reason with people. After all, Paul did admonish us to do all things “in a fitting and orderly way” (1 Cor. 14:40). It simply means that reasoning alone—talking to the left brain—will not always accomplish our purpose.
God gave each of us an imagination—the picture gallery of the mind—and He expects us to use it. “It is by imagination that men have lived,” said Dixon; “imagination rules all our lives.” In fact, Napoleon said that “imagination governs the world.” Because many preachers (and some who teach preachers) have forgotten that basic fact, hermeneutics has become analyzing, homiletics has become organizing, and preaching has become catechizing. The sermon is a logical outhne, a lecture buttressed with theology, that majors on explanation and application but ignores visualization. We have forgotten that the bridge between the mind and the will is the imagination, and that truth isn’t really learned until it’s internalized. “The purpose of preaching,” wrote Halford Luccock, “is not to make people see reasons, but visions.”[3]
Needed—A Healthy Imagination
Imagination is the image-making faculty in your mind, the picture gallery in which you are constantly painting, sculpting, designing, and sometimes erasing. “God is the Supreme artist,” Clyde S. Kilby reminds us[4]; and since we are made in the image of God, we share in His creative ability. That creative gift resides for the most part in the imagination.
Dwight E. Stevenson defines imagination as “the capacity to see old and familiar things in new associations from new perspectives, to combine things not previously put together.”[5] Leland Ryken says, “The imagination is the human faculty that allows us to create something new, to see or feel something familiar in a fresh way, to express an old truth in a new manner, to make a new application of truth to life.”[6]
Recalling, perceiving, and combining seem to be the major functions of the imagination, and they add up to creating. “The Imagination is one of the highest prerogatives of man,” wrote Charles Darwin. “By this faculty he unites former images and ideas, independently of the will, and thus creates brilliant and novel results.”[7] The house you live in, the chair you’re sitting on, the car you drive, the book you’re now reading, and the computer on which it was written, were all first of all “born” in somebody’s imagination.
Imagination is a womb that is impregnated with the old so that it might give birth to the new. It is the bridge that links the world around you with the world within you. It’s also one of the bridges between your right brain and your left brain, so that vision has supervision and doesn’t become just visionary. As the French moralist Joseph Joubert said, “He who has imagination but no knowledge has wings but no feet.”
Very often when you start to talk about the imagination, orthodox Christians start to get nervous.[8] This fear arises because many fine Christian people are prone to confuse imagination with the imaginary, what I call fancy. They don’t want their preacher dabbling in daydreams, illusions, and whimsy. After all, Paul warned preachers, “Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales” (1 Tim. 4:7); and the admonition is, “Preach the Word” (2 Tim. 4:2).
Fancy—the imaginary—is only one product of the imagination, and we must have great respect for people such as Walt Disney and J.R.R. Tolkien who can invent whole new universes to the delight and entertainment of the world. But there’s a vast difference between imagination and fancy. Imagination helps us penetrate reality and better understand it, while fancy helps us temporarily escape reality and better endure it. Fancy builds an alternate world (Middle Earth, Lilliput, Oz), usually related in some recognizable way to the real world; but imagination sees a deeper world right where we are.[9] Samuel Johnson was right when he wrote to Boswell back in 1774, “We may take Fancy for a companion, but we must follow Reason as our guide.”[10]
C.S. Lewis wrote: “For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”[11] In other words, a healthy imagination is essential if we ever hope to understand how one truth relates to another and how both of them relate to life. It takes more than a dictionary and a grammar to grasp the message of King Lear or “Tintern Abbey,” and it takes more than a set of Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament and a copy of Robertson’s Shorter Greek Grammar to see meaning in the exciting images shared by John in the Book of Revelation.
Some Christians have a second mistaken idea about imagination, an idea that usually shows up in books on “how to improve your preaching” or “how to be more creative in the ministry.” The idea is that God gave us imagination only so that we can embellish things and appear clever. The emphasis is on thinking up striking sermon titles, finding arresting illustrations, and developing unusual outhnes. The approach is purely cosmetic. It sees imagination as skill in decorating the cake with no thought given to improving the recipe. Imagination in preaching is not a new technique to be learned but a radical new attitude and outlook to be cultivated. If in reading this book, you’re hoping to find six easy steps toward more imaginative preaching, now is the time to stop reading because you’re only wasting your time.
Why is it important that you cultivate a healthy imagination and, guided by the Spirit of God, use it in your ministry? This effort results in essential benefits for you as a human being, for your ministry, and for the people to whom you minister.
Let’s begin with what a healthy imagination means to you personally as a human being. You were created in the image of God, created by an imaginative God who is infinitely original. You were created to assist Him in caring for His creation and in building His church. You were created to enjoy all that God’s artistic mind has conceived and His powerful hands have made. You were created to cultivate your inner person—including your imagination—and use all that you are to the glory of God.
Christians who ignore or neglect the cultivating of their imagination can’t enter into the full enjoyment of all that God has for them. A sanctified imagination opens the door to so much that is beautiful and enriching that it’s a pity more believers don’t realize what they are missing and do something about it. Horace Bushnell said, “God gave man imagination that He might have a door to enter by.”[12] The English poet and mystic Thomas Traherne wrote in his book Centuries of Meditations, “For God hath made you able to create worlds in your own mind which are more precious to Him than those which He created.”[13] Our thoughts of Him, our meditations on His Word, our seasons of prayer-all are related to the imagination and can help us grow in grace. Remember, I’m referring to imagination and not fancy; for entertaining fanciful thoughts about God is just as idolatrous as making an image of God and bowing before it.
The imagination must be fed just as the mind and heart must be fed. William Temple defined “worship” as “the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose. . . . ”[14] The imagination must be captivated by the beauty of God as revealed in the Word of God. If not, it will be captivated by some lesser beauty; and this is the first step toward idolatry.
Even if you and I were not in the ministry, we would still need to cultivate the imagination in order to be full and complete human beings, created in the image of God. But because we are in ministry, we have an even greater reason for opening the imagination to God’s truth and beauty: we must communicate God’s truth to others, and we can’t do this effectively unless we understand the important part imagination plays in all that we do. Once again, we see the choice between the approach of Ahithophel and the approach of Hushai.
Consider this matter of Bible study. “The Bible is, in the finest sense, the most imaginative book ever written,” said Clyde S. Kilby.[15] People who study the Word of God with only a left-brain outlook will miss much of what this marvelous Book has to say. They will be like those people in the Gospel of John who couldn’t understand the spiritual language Jesus used because they lacked imagination: When Jesus spoke about His resurrection, the Jews thought He was talking about rebuilding the temple (John 2:19-21); Nicodemus was perplexed when Jesus spoke about a new birth (3:1-12); the Samaritan woman wondered where He would get the water He was offering her (4:1-15); the disciples didn’t understand what kind of food He ate (4:31-33); and the Jewish crowd was offended when He told them to eat His flesh and drink His blood (6:52-59).[16] These and other examples demonstrate that it takes more than left-brain exegesis and analysis, important as they are, to open up the treasures of the Bible. Said R.W. Dale, “There is hardly a page of Holy Scripture which will not become more intelligible to us if we read it with an active imagination.”[17]
Now, the frightening thing is this: very few current books written about hermeneutics and exegesis even mention the imagination. They explain how to approach the figurative language of the Bible and how to deal with types and symbols, but they fail to explain the important part the imagination plays in pulling the whole thing together so that we can see what the writer is saying. To quote Halford Luccock again:
The tragedy often is that the more a man studies, the worse he gets; his mind becomes subdued to what he works in, and the textbook style of language hardens on him like a shell. He becomes a literary and vocal crustacean. The preacher who is too busy to read poetry, fiction, drama and the naturalists is too busy. While he is busy here or there with Kant or John Dewey or Karl Barth or Karl Marx or other Olympians, the opportunity of speaking for God to people in their native tongue is gone.[18]
We find all kinds of literature in the Bible—narrative, poetry, proverbs, riddles, songs, parables, symbols, drama, paradoxes, epigrams—and these various genre must be recognized and approached in the right spirit if we hope to discover their treasures. We don’t deal with the imagery of Psalm 23 as we do the theology of Romans 8.[19] Blessed is that Bible student who comes to God’s Word with an open mind, a loving heart, a submissive will, and a sensitive imagination. I agree with A.J. Gossip: “Of all possessions, few are more serviceable to the preacher than a wise and schooled imagination.”[20] And Henry Ward Beecher told the preachers at Yale that “the first element on which your preaching will largely depend for power and success, you will probably be surprised to learn, is Imagination, which I regard as the most important of all the elements that go to make the preacher.”[21]
Imagination and Pastoring
So, we need imagination to study the Bible accurately and be able to enter into its message sympathetically. We also need imagination to build a bridge between that ancient Book and the needs of people today. Our preaching must be in the present tense so that we’re not just lecturing to our people about what happened to Noah, David, and Paul. Harry Emerson Fosdick’s wry comment is still true—that nobody ever goes to church to find out what happened to the Hittites.
I’ve often recommended to ministerial students what I will now recommend to you: after you have prepared the sermon, carefully review it and bravely ask yourself, “So what?” Imagine your congregation before you—the executive who just lost his job, the teenager struggling against peer pressure, the young mother worried about her child’s illness, the single parent trying to balance the budget, and just about everybody fighting temptation and some besetting sin—and see if what you’re planning to share with them will mean anything to them. Imagine yourself in their situation, responding to what you are saying. Anticipate their objections, their misunderstandings of your words, their hidden defenses, and then prepare for them.[22] On more than one occasion, when I have examined a sermon in this way, I have ended up scrapping the entire sermon and starting over again; and I should have done so more often.
This is where pastoral work comes in—getting to know your people, how they think, what they need, and what they want God to do in their lives. With the emphasis today on the mega-church and the minister as CEO, the very mention of pastoral ministry, except for counseling, makes some people smile and automatically relegate you to the age of the ministerial dinosaur. When I was in seminary, the professors assured us that “a home-going pastor makes for a church-going people.” That may not be as true today as it was in the ’40s and ’50s, but I do know this: a pastor with a shepherd’s heart and a healthy imagination, one who knows his sheep and loves them, will do a better job communicating God’s love and truth than the ivory-tower executive who, unlike Jesus Christ, has no time for people. Churches grow when people care, and that caring has to be modeled by the pastor, personally and from the pulpit.
Hushai knew people. He knew that Absalom’s mind was a picture gallery, not a debating chamber; so he spoke to him about wild bears, lions, the sand on the seashore, the dew setthng, and a city being destroyed. Hushai knew that the imagination of every man and woman has an appetite and must be fed. Many of the people who attend church today have starved imaginations for one reason or another, and they can never have healthy imaginations unless they change their diets.
In a later chapter, I will deal with the tragedy of starved imaginations and what the church must do about it. But now we move to the second thing Hushai knew: he knew the world around him.
“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
“Learn to associate ideas worthy of God with all that happens in Nature—the sunrises and the sunsets, the sun and the stars, the changing seasons, and your imagination will never be at the mercy of your impulses, but will always be at the service of God.”