25 August 2010
Psalm 119:1-24; Job 6:1,7:1-21; Acts 10:1-16; John 7:1-13

Job continues his complaint about the meaninglessness of life. His basic complaint is that life is short, mean and meaningless. His cry is for understanding and for God to leave him alone. What is man that you make so much of him is a bitter cry rather than the marveling of David in the Psalms. When pain is in our lives we want God to look away from us if He will not remove the source of the pain and here the source of Job’s pain is his very existence. There are many similarities and parallels to Psalm 139 with this passage and indeed the entire book of Job, with a striking difference, here there is no resolution into the realization that God’s attention to us is a comforting thing. Job cannot see any good from God’s attention to him. If this is the result of sin, why can God not simply pardon his sin? In my ministry I have heard this very thought expressed and I too have struggled in this same way. Pain is absolutely God’s megaphone into our lives.

Jesus stays out of Jerusalem and its environs as His time has not yet come. There is already a faction that wants to destroy Him and yet there remains work to be done prior to that hour. His family prods Jesus to go to Jerusalem for the feast of booths, a time of remembrance of the years in the wilderness, to recall God’s provision, that prosperity is not the only time when God was present to the nation. Most of the festivals recall God’s mighty actions while the feast of booths is a reminder that sometimes God is with us even when we have just enough, the daily bread of the wilderness and the makeshift, temporary dwellings of the years in the wilderness. Jesus eventually goes up to Jerusalem but quietly and in secret rather than as on Palm Sunday, and He and the disciples hear the buzz about Him, both good and bad.

Cornelius is a man who fears God but has not taken the step of becoming a Jew. Perhaps that would have cost him his position in the army, as the leader of a hundred men? He was a man of character and generosity and here his prayers to God are answered for one who will come and reveal God to him. He sends slaves and a fellow God-fearer from among his soldiers to fetch this Simon, he is careful about who knows what he is doing. Peter is hungry and is waiting on his food when he gets the vision of the sheet coming down from heaven and the command to go and kill and eat. The message is two-fold, God is declaring all food clean but also preparing Peter for the men who are about to come and find him to a place where his understanding of the work of Jesus will be enlarged beyond his wildest imagination.

Deal bountifully with your servant,
so that I may live and observe your word.
Open my eyes, so that I may behold
wondrous things out of your law.