So
fish cost nothing in Egypt and they had it made. Memories are truly short aren’t they? Forgotten is the bitter slavery and
mistreatment, remembered are the delicacies of Egypt and now they were
free. Perhaps they caught them in the
Nile, but what difference does that make, nothing costs anything in the
wilderness. This is the last straw as
far as Moses is concerned. He can do
nothing about the complaint and all the people are standing in the doors of
their tents weeping and wailing because they want meat. Is their complaint
unreasonable? Moses has only one thing
to do, pray and ask the Lord, but he doesn’t, he quits, he lays the people
down, distancing himself from them. The
Lord has mercy on him by giving him seventy elders to help with the work. Moses lacks faith that the Lord can provide
meat for this multitude, just like the disciples lack the faith Jesus can feed
the five thousand. Faith is always the
needful thing.
Peter
surely knew better than to say that Jesus paid the temple tax. Jesus’ response to him concerning his
duplicity was to make an extraordinary claim.
He need not pay the temple tax because he is the son of the One
worshipped at the temple. Jesus provides
the money for the tax by sending Peter to do a little fishing. Surely that idea sounded strange to Peter, it
was going to require faith. Peter knew
how to fish but he fished with a net not a hook and line. He must have felt like an idiot standing on
the bank, casting a line in the hope that it would help him catch a fish with a
shekel in its mouth but we have to believe he did. He got not only a lecture but also an
incredible sign, a fish that was even better than free.
Paul
felt no shame in the Gospel, a Gospel that has the potential for shame
indeed. It is a strange concept and
always has been that Jesus was God, was born of a virgin and died on a cross to
be bodily resurrected on the third day.
It flies in the face of reason and requires faith to believe. Stranger still is that all this brings
eternal life for those who believe and that is a free gift of God. If we do not believe and put our faith in
Jesus, we receive God’s wrath. The
Gospel demands we stop trying to do it ourselves, that there is nothing we can
do, partly because we have the whole thing wrong from the start, and that we
receive grace, unmerited favor. Paul
says that wisdom is displayed in faith, that those who fail to live by faith
end up perverting everything that is common sense and plain to them. There may be no such thing as a free lunch
but free is the word for grace. It will,
however, cost you this other life to gain the life of God.
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