Can you imagine that you have lost everything, your kids,
your wealth, and now your very health and having a "friend" say to
you, " If your children
have sinned against him, he has delivered them into the hand of their
transgression."? Bildad's advice
isn't wrong, seek God and He will bless you, but his theology is a form of
prosperity theology and based in a certain amount of personal pride. The converse of all he suggests is that
because he isn't suffering as Job is there must be an explanation and that explanation
is that he, Bildad, is more righteous than Job.
The rain falls on the just and
the unjust alike and it is bad theology to suggest that there is a causal
connection between righteousness and earthly blessing. The only righteous man who ever lived died on
a cross with a crown of thorns on His head, His back stripped of flesh from the
beating He had been given.
A humorist in the 19th century, Josh Billings, once wrote,
""It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble.
It's the things we know that just ain't so." The people believe they know where Jesus
comes from and we happen to know that they don't actually know that at
all. They are judging by appearances
rather than making right judgments. Since
we chose to know good and evil independently of God we have never ceased to do
so. Their judgments are based on knowing
His origins and what the leaders believe, not on what they see and hear. Knowing apart from God is a significant
problem in our lives.
Peter does the right thing in asking the Lord what the
vision means and is obedient to the Lord's call on him. Cornelius has also acted in faith, calling
together his relatives and close friends to hear what this man Peter might have
to say. Peter arrives and finds
"many persons gathered." He knows
immediately that the vision has been about not simply food but people, that
clean and unclean are no longer important distinctions. All through the Gospel Jesus has ignored such
distinctions in healing lepers, the woman with the issue of blood, the Gerasene
demoniac and others and now that same attitude is to be among His followers in
order to take the Gospel to all people. Come
and see has been replaced with go and tell.
In Jesus the unclean is made clean.
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