Isaiah sees the Lord coming in wrath to redeem His people
but none will go with Him, He will have to do the work alone. The Levites made their name by their
willingness to act on His behalf of the Lord and righteousness when the people
were worshipping the golden calf in Exodus 32.
They took up arms and killed their own kith and kin in order to restore
order and to stop the madness that had taken over the camp. They stood with Him that day and three
thousand Israelites were killed but the Lord blessed them for their willingness
to take up His cause, even against their brothers. Isaiah's prophecy tells us that the Lord will
accomplish redemption alone, and in that vision we see the reality of Jesus on
the cross, alone, accomplishing redemption.
The first two signs were done away from Jerusalem, in
Galilee. Surely the word had spread to
Jerusalem but now at the time of the feast Jesus goes to Jerusalem. Why does Jesus go to the Sheep Gate, the
place where sacrificial animals were brought into the city, to this particular
pool where lay "a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and
paralyzed"? Why does He offer
healing to this one man, who had lain there thirty-eight years and no one
else? He seems to have chosen one of the
worst people there, a man so completely
ungrateful for his healing that
he immediately told the officials that Jesus had commanded
him to carry his bed. Contrast this man
with the man born blind in John 9 and you will see an extraordinary
difference. Jesus commanded the man to
do something blatantly against the law in carrying the bed on the Sabbath, to
see which they would notice, the sign of the remarkable healing or the breaking
of their law. They missed the sign
completely. What is righteousness? Is mercy greater than the law or is the law
greater?
What does it mean to tolerate Jezebel? Here, it is clear that the church is
tolerating this spirit among its members, she is teaching the Lord's servants
to practice sexual immorality and to eat food sacrificed to idols. The apostolic council in Acts 15 had to
decide the relationship of the Law to the church, particularly the church that
was composed of Gentiles and it required only that they "abstain from the
things polluted by idols, and from sexual immorality, and from what has been
strangled, and from blood." In
Thyatira and some of the other churches even these requirements seem to have been
ignored. Again, there is a dualistic
understanding of life that believes that the flesh and spirit are separate and
since the body eventually decomposes and we receive a new one then it doesn't
ultimately matter what we do with it.
The incarnation would seem to give the lie to such a belief, the body
mattered enough that Jesus took on flesh and the eucharist is centered on the
idea that Jesus suffered in the flesh, gave that flesh for us and the blood
wasn't some spiritual blood, it was real.
The cross is meaningless unless the body matters. Salvation isn't only a spiritual matter, it
is bodily, we are redeemed to life now, not only eternal life.
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