31 May 2011

Psalm 78:1-39; Deut. 8:11-20; James 1:16-27; Luke 11:1-13

How are the people to remember the Lord? By keeping His commandments, rules and statutes, by obedience they will show they are in covenant with Him and that they recognize Him as Lord. The covenant between God and Israel was predicated on their keeping the law and when they failed in any respect to acknowledge the failure, make the sacrifice and return to the way of the Lord. We have no need of sacrifice, Jesus’ death on the cross was a once for all sacrifice, but the other aspects of the covenant relationship remain, obedience, confession and repentance. Moses here is worried about the people when they come into and possess the land that they will forget the lessons they learned regarding trust and failure in the wilderness. He has led this people for forty years and is well aware of who they are and what is likely. It generally doesn’t take very long for us to begin attributing our success or prosperity to ourselves or to some other force in the universe that we suppose is responsible. We remember the Lord well by keeping His commands and remembering all He has done for us and teaching our children to do the same.

The disciples want Jesus to teach them how to pray and Jesus provides them with what we know as the Lord’s prayer but is more properly the disciples prayer. It begins with the recognition of the greatness of God’s Name and then asks for His kingdom to come, the recognition that we do not currently enjoy the fullness of God’s blessing in the earth. We are asking for more which should remind us that we should not be satisfied with the way things are. It is in keeping with Jesus’ admonition to seek first the kingdom of God and here in the prayer that is the first petition. The transition to earthly things is made with asking for our daily bread, a beggar’s petition and rightly so since all things come from the father, we are like those in the wilderness receiving manna each day and grateful for it because no source of sustenance exists unless He provides. We next acknowledge our failure to keep covenant by asking for forgiveness and immediately are reminded that as we need forgiveness, so do others and we are called to be forgiving. The parables Jesus tells are an encouragement to pray asking God for all that we need and are based on His fatherly goodness of which we are assured. We know all we need to know about the Father’s love for us in the cross of Jesus.

James reminds us that every good and perfect gift comes down from God, just as Jesus has promised. What is our response to this reality, thankfulness and obedience. We are not saved by works but by grace and we cannot earn our salvation or our blessings in this life yet are we not more likely to be on a path where blessing is possible if we are obedient? We may have to adjust our definition of blessing to make it line up with God’s definition but being doers of the word and not hearers only will change us to desire what God desires and to make us ready to see Him at work in all things. Christians are intended to learn the word not for the sake of knowledge but for the sake of conforming our lives to God’s will, seeing His kingdom established in us and His will being done through us.

Come, thou incarnate Word,

gird on thy mighty sword,

our prayer attend!

Come, and thy people bless,

and give thy word success,

Spirit of holiness,

on us descend!

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30 May 2011

Psalm 80; Deut. 8:1-10; James 1:1-15; Luke 9:18-27

Moses reminds the people of all that the Lord has done for them these forty years in the wilderness. As they prepare to enter the good land, they need to remember these years and why they experienced all these things. They have been disciplined for a failure of faith, the failure to trust God to deal with their enemies in the land of promise, and yet in His discipline He has protected and preserved them. How could people have walked in the wilderness forty years and their sandals not wear out or their feet swell? It is important that they remember this time and the lessons they have learned in order that they always be a people of faith and thanksgiving. To be thankful is to remember that all that we have and all that we are is gift rather than accomplishment. What we do with our gifts and talents matters, they are to be developed but the gift and the potential in the gift are not “of us” but rather “from God.”

Jesus tells the disciples of his suffering, death and resurrection and calls them and us to the way of suffering and the cross as well. Yes, He is the Christ of God but they aren’t allowed to draw out their own explanations for what that will mean. Left to their own devices the disciples will conclude that this will mean the establishment of the kingdom and Jesus affirms that they will see that kingdom but it won’t look like what they believe it to be. The kingdom of God understood by the Jewish people doesn’t include a Messiah who suffers and dies and it doesn’t include the Gentiles as full covenant partners. The kingdom for which they are waiting is more an earthly kingdom with religious overtones. Jesus says His kingdom is not of this earth when He is questioned by Pilate but that does not mean it is purely spiritual, there is another earth that is coming and there will be an earthly character to that kingdom but its King will be God the Father.

Is anyone truly thankful for trials? Trials, however, produce character through steadfast perseverance. Trials are necessary for our faith to be tested and strengthened. We are intended to grow in our dependence on and trust in the Lord and not many of us are naturally good at being thankful for all things. Trials cause us to recognize how tenuous is our situation and how truly we need the Lord. Jonathan Edwards sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, emphasized this very point, that we are like spiders on a sinewy web which may collapse at any time so we must build our lives on something more, on the Lord Himself. In facing temptations and trials James says we develop the trait of steadfastness, which is one of the most celebrated of the traits of God Himself, it is perhaps the most important trait in a covenant partner.

Come, thou almighty King,

help us thy Name to sing,

help us to praise!

Father all glorious,

over all victorious,

come and reign over us,

Ancient of Days!

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29 May 2011

Psalm 93, 96; Ecclus. 43:1-12,27-32; 1 Tim. 3:14-4:5; Matt. 13:24-34a

The beauty of creation is matched by only one thing, its precision. It is amazing how fine tuned the universe is for life on this particular planet. The sun is a perfect distance away, our moon set perfectly in place to provide the gravitational pull for the tides and the reflected light of the sun in the night-time. Our atmosphere is perfect for carbon-based life to thrive and we not only get the functionality of it all but also the beauty of it all. The writer is absolutely correct, “We could say more but could never say enough; let the final word be: ‘He is the all.’”

Jesus teaches about the kingdom of God using parables because there is no exact analogue to the kingdom. It is like all three of these things, the wheat and weeds, the mustard seed and the leaven introduced into the measures of flour. In this world we never see the fullness of the kingdom without those among us who are not part of the kingdom but look like they are until the harvest when there is no fruit in them. We see the kingdom of God grow from very little like the mustard seed into a great tree that provides shelter for many when we see it begin with eleven men and a hundred or so others on the day of Pentecost to several thousand that day and nearly 2 billion in our own time. We see also that growth like when dough is leavened and rises in the bowl, in both cases almost magical growth happens.

Paul speaks to Timothy of the “mystery of godliness.” Strange language for a man like Paul who had spent his entire adult life pursuing godliness and never until he met Jesus on the road to Damascus had he thought that godliness was a mystery. Paul had understood godliness to be a matter of keeping the commandments of God like all Pharisees until he received the Holy Spirit to guide him to truly, spiritually understanding the commandments required more than simply an intellectual approach to them. One of the examples he offers in regards to this mystery is prohibition on certain foods that he would have endorsed because the law forbade their consumption. His new understanding is that all things are good because God created them but all things are more than good if they are received with thanksgiving and prayer. Remember Jesus taught that what goes into a person doesn’t defile them but rather what comes out. Does that mean that the law has been done away with, that is has no meaning in the life of a Christian? Absolutely not, but if the mission to the Gentiles was to go forward, food couldn’t be the barrier as it wasn’t sinful in itself since it was God’s creation.

O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonder

Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made.

I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,

Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, my Saviour God, to Thee;

How great Thou art, how great Thou art!

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee:

How great Thou art, how great Thou art!

28 May 2011

Psalm 75, 76; Wisdom 19:1-8,18-22; Rom. 15:1-13; Luke 9:1-17

All of creation participated in the exodus. Solomon marvels at the ways in which the Lord used creation to accomplish His will in bringing His people out of Egypt. The Lord is able to transform the properties of creation in order to avoid disrupting the lives of any but the Egyptians who showed a profound lack of wisdom in chasing the people into the wilderness and to the Red Sea. They had failed to read the signs in the heavens for which they were so famous. They believed in the gods of and in the heavens and those gods were shown to be ineffectual gods compared to the God of the Hebrews and yet they failed to fear Him and gain the wisdom that was on offer. Had they gained wisdom from the plagues, the demonstration of God’s power, they would have allowed the Hebrews to go as Moses requested.

The disciples had seen the power of God flow through them to accomplish all that Jesus had commanded them to do but they still lacked faith in some things. They had faith enough to go out and at least exert the power and authority of God over demons and disease and they were able to report on the remarkable success of their mission but they weren’t quite sure about feeding a multitude with the little resources they had available to them. Jesus, however, had more than enough faith to believe it could be done. How it is accomplished no one seems to have ventured to guess except modern-day rationalists who pontificate that what actually happened was that the crowds had their own food and when they saw Jesus prepared to share what He and the disciples had they came forth and shared their provisions. That would not be worth recording in all the Gospels, only a miraculous provision would be worth telling by all the writers.

In this passage Paul first identifies the Lord as the God of endurance and encouragement and his prayer is that these properties of the living God will bring them together in harmony that they may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In Paul’s day particularly there was a constant tension in the church between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians and it was important that they all come together in their witness to Jesus and what it meant to be a follower of Christ. Paul has just finished urging them to focus on primary things and stop arguing about secondary issues and now he brings them together in Christ Jesus. Finally he calls attention to God as the God of all hope and his prayer with regards to that attribute is that this hope will fill them with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit they may abound in hope. Belief in Jesus, the belief that He died in our place, took the punishment for our sins, and was raised to life on the third day which means we have been cleansed of sin and now are fit, through Jesus work and faith in His blood, to be raised to life with Him. That belief is the source of all our hope and our hope is in the One who made the covenant of life so we know that He is faithful and the promise is sure. He has overcome all things, even death, so we know He is sovereign over all things.

And thou most kind and gentle Death,
Waiting to hush our latest breath,
O praise Him! Alleluia!
Thou leadest home the child of God,
And Christ our Lord the way hath trod.

O praise Him! O praise Him!
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!

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27 May 2011

Psalm 106:1-18; Wisdom 16:15-17:1; Rom. 14:13-23; Luke 8:40-56

Solomon re-imagines the events of the Exodus, particularly the plagues which destroyed the agriculture of Egypt but not of the Israelites. What he does is intriguing. He speaks of fire and water as the means by which God executed judgment on Egypt where lightning and hail were the physical causes. It is a wonderful way of re-casting the image so that what seems a paradox describes accurately the reality of the situation. He then shows that creation itself was a weapon against the Egyptians for God’s judgment while at the same time it worked benignly on behalf of the Israelites. Again we see God’s sovereignty over all things in these judgments. Solomon also tells us something about the manna that we don’t know where he gets his information; that it tasted to each one as whatever was pleasing to the person.

Again we see ritual defilement with the woman with the issue of blood touching Jesus’ garment. She is required to keep away from others lest they be contaminated ritually by contact with this unclean woman. She risks being in the crowd and then touching Jesus and her willingness to affirm that she was the one who touched him could have led to judgment against her but if she is now clean by virtue of healing then is Jesus defiled? Nothing defiled was made clean by contact with that which was clean but here she was no longer defiled so how were they to interpret the situation? Jairus doesn’t care where Jesus has been or who has touched him, all he cares about is that his daughter is dying and that Jesus might be able to do something, all those other questions are secondary. There is nothing like an emergency to help the mind determine primary and secondary issues. Jesus charged them to tell no one what had happened. Do you think they were obedient to that charge?

Paul’s argument is that there is no longer any distinction among food items. There is neither clean nor unclean any longer and yet he appeals to the strong brother to refrain from exercising his rights with regards to these things so that his freedom does not cause the weaker brother to stumble. Our consciences may convict us of certain prohibitions such as alcohol but God has not made general prohibition of alcohol. We must distinguish between the two but we should also exercise our freedom in love for our neighbor. Perhaps our neighbor’s conscience will not allow her to drink alcohol as it would be a slippery slope for her. We should not demand that she share our conviction on this issue and partake and we should refrain from exercising our freedom when we are with her. Paul’s governing principle is love and charity. If, however, our conscience (by this I mean the Holy Spirit) convicts us concerning any food or drink then we should be obedient to that conviction but not generalize to a prohibition for all.

He gave us eyes to see them,
And lips that we might tell
How great is God Almighty,
Who has made all things well.

All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
All things wise and wonderful:
The Lord God made them all.

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