16 October 2011

Psalm 148, 149, 150; Jer. 29:1,4-14; Acts 16:6-15; Luke 10:1-20

Jeremiah writes to the exiles who were taken away to Babylon. His message is that they should settle in where they are for this is going to take a while. Seventy years he says they will be exiled from Jerusalem. We know that this was to give the land the Sabbath rest it had been denied for many years as Israel did not observe the restrictions of Sabbath years (every seventh year the land was to lie fallow). They are instructed to pray for the welfare of Babylon because in her prosperity they will find prosperity and peace as well, they are to be, in other words, good citizens. The wives they are encouraged to take are clearly not Babylonians but fellow Jews as the Lord never once gave His people the license to marry outside the faith. While this exile will be long, nearly twice as long as the time their ancestors spent in the wilderness, He will not abandon them and it will not be permanent.

Jesus sends out the 72 on the mission to heal and proclaim the coming of the kingdom of God. They are sent out in vulnerability and can trust only in the Lord for the success of the mission and their own support. I am always amazed at this mission trip and yet the truth is that we tend to trust in our provision and undertake things we more or less know we can do on our own when we do mission trips. We are called to trust in Him and to undertake the mission of proclamation as well but we often prepare as the world prepares and to do the good works we are comfortable with on these missions. The same goes for “church”, we rarely rely fully on Him and we keep our visions small enough that we should be able to get there on our own power.

Paul goes to Philippi at the vision of a man of Macedonia urging him to come. There seems to have been no synagogue in Philippi so we know there were not 10 faithful Jewish men there, the minimum number to establish a house of worship. Paul then heads to the river where they supposed there would be a group of women praying together. He found not the man of Macedonia but a woman from Thyatira there who was prepared to be the woman of peace in that place. Paul went to Philippi with no foreknowledge of how he would stay there or who he would find and the Lord provided for him in this foreign place where many gods were worshipped but few Jews were there. He went solely due to the vision, without promise and God provided and built the church there to whom Paul wrote one of the most wonderful epistles we have in the New Testament.

O quickly come, dread Judge of all,
For, awful though Thine advent be;
All shadows from the truth will fall,
And falsehood die, in sight of Thee.
O quickly come, for doubt and fear
Like clouds dissolve when Thou art near.

Tune