Interstate 35 Revisited

God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son.”
Abe said, “Man, you must be putting me on.”
God said, “No.”
Abe said, “What?”
God said, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run.”
So Abe said, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God said, “Out on Highway 61.”
– Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited”

I’ve seen this story like three or four times on the internet. At this point, I have to join the crowd and write something about the Highway of Holiness. Granted, every blogger and their brother has probably already done this, but I’ve got my thoughts on it, and maybe they’ll be at least slightly different than the other analysis that’s out there.

And yeah, the Bob Dylan reference isn’t really that fitting. I did it mainly because it’s an excuse for me to quote Bob Dylan. That, and the idea of God taking special interest in a particular roadway is almost comical–as if land and asphalt were that important to the Almighty.

For those of you who haven’t seen this, there’s a church group from Texas who have started a project called “Light the Highway” where they’re praying for people and businesses along Interstate 35. It’s a little more complicated than that, and I’m not going to discuss their methods or focus. There’s a post on Slacktivist that does a really good job of this already, and I can’t really add anything to it.

What I’m curious to explore is the concept that a passage in Isaiah 35 refers to I-35. Different news articles present this concept in different ways, and it’s obvious we’re not getting the full impact of this church’s understanding from a news article. I imagine the only way you could get the full impact of it is to actually spend time among that congregation.

I think there are two ways one could take the I-35 / Isaiah 35 connection. Either they believe it’s symbolic, or they think there’s an actual prophetic connection here.

If it’s symbolic, this isn’t so crazy. It would be something akin to the 3:16 project Donald Knuth talks about in his book Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About (link goes to my blog post discussing it). Knuth studied the 3:16 verse of every book in the Bible in order to gain a better understanding of the work as a whole. But he didn’t think there was anything magical about the 3:16 verse–rather, it was a good statistical sample, and the chapter/verse number was chosen because John 3:16 is one of the most famous verses in the Bible.

A symbolic link would be great fodder for marketing this campaign to their church and others who wanted to get involved. Isaiah 35 speaks of a “Highway of Holiness,” the pitch might go, let’s make our own “I-35” one as well. They wouldn’t be arguing that God revealed anything to Isaiah about I-35 when the book of Isaiah was written; they’d just be using the interesting connection to underscore something they felt needed to be done in their region.

And that’s great. Again, the post on Slacktivist brings their methods and focus into question–and it makes a very good point that I don’t want to gloss over. But at its very core, the idea of a group of people out praying and (more importantly) getting active in their community is a good thing.

There’s a slightly different connotation if these people believe that Isaiah 35 prophetically refers to I-35–not the least of which is the chapter and verse numbers in the Bible were added way after the fact. You have to have a skewed idea of divine inspiration of the Bible to think that God would number the chapters and verses just perfectly thousands of years after the book of Isaiah was written–especially if He did it just so His people could play strange numerological games with His revelation to humanity. That’s a little bit crazy on so many levels.

But there’s one main level I really want to focus on here–it’s the idea that a prophetic connection affords them some sort of purpose and significance to a project. It’s not that purpose and significance should be unimportant to the human psyche, but their importance shouldn’t be overinflated, and they shouldn’t be created where they don’t exist. This sort of understanding doesn’t move people to go out and do something because it’s the right thing to do, it motivates people to do something because they get to be part of a major movement of God. (Thus, significance and purpose for themselves.)

The important difference here is that this sort of thinking undermines the importance of the everyday and the ordinary. It’s only important to help others if it means God is somehow present in your life in a very unique way. This is a little bit backwards from the two great commandments of Christianity: love God and love your neighbor. Instead, you’re acting like you love your neighbor in an attempt to force God to act on your behalf.

Now, I’m not saying that’s what these people are doing, because I can only make conclusions from a news article. As I said, it’s very hard to tell what they believe about the Isaiah 35 / I-35 connection. What people actually believe about that connection probably differs from person-to-person, and it probably fluctuates somewhere between these two attitudes I just described.