One of the great joys of Christmas is (for me) receiving a new recipe book or some new cooking utensil. My father usually buys me one or the other and it’s great to experiment with new items or new recipes (though I have to confess that the last new recipe I tried did not work out well, a ‘gingered beef casserole’ from the Dairy Diary, which I assumed would be rather like a beef and ale pie, only to discover that ginger ale is disgustingly sweet and doesn’t lose this sweetness, even when slow-cooked for hours with stewing beef… Still, you live and learn!)
More successful was my ‘fondant dessert kit’ (a set of silicone moulds and recipe book allowing me to make hot sponge desserts with a hot sauce filling which was pronounced very tasty by those who consumed this on New Year’s Day.)
One of the interesting things about cooking is how you assemble a list of ingredients and equipment that will, more often than not, bear little resemblance to the finished product. Thus, the fondant dessert used plain chocolate, sugar, butter, self-raising flour and eggs to create a gooey sponge that looked nothing like its constituent parts.
I find Bible study very similar to cooking. A teacher takes the individual ingredients of God’s Word, analysing individual words (What was the Hebrew or Greek word used? Where else is it found in the Bible? What are all the different translations of this word?), striving to understand historical context (What were these ‘games’ that Paul is talking about in 1 Cor 9:25?), looking for how the different pieces of the Bible fit together, seeking to tease meaning from obscure passages, studying to show themselves approved, as one who can correctly handle the word of God (2 Tim 2:15). The process is painstaking, laborious, often simultaneously fascinating and boring, and looks rather like the chef in the kitchen, laying out ingredients, greasing moulds, turning on ovens, creating what is apparently, to outsiders, quite a mess!
Hopefully the finished product looks (and tastes) vastly different from the messy process of study and creativity… but it’s a fact that the finished product cannot appear without the hard work that goes in beforehand. As the cooking proverb goes, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs…