The worship of Baal is
centered around the belief that the god controls productivity of the land. If you want to ensure that the land is fertile,
has enough but not too much rain for instance, then you do certain acts of
worship in order to appease Baal and entice him to provide that fertility. It is based on sympathetic magic, the
worshippers do what they want Baal to do, and it is about sex. The Baal worship required temple prostitutes
and here, both Israel, the northern kingdom, and Judah, the southern kingdom,
are accused of spiritual prostitution in going after this worship. Hills and certain trees were the places of
Baal worship, there is a sense in which it could be defined as earth worship
but with a god. Israel has already
received her punishment for this sin and yet Judah has learned nothing from
Israel's experience and has done the same.
The promise is restoration, the requirement is confession and
repentance. Judah is accused of sort of
confessing but not truly repenting, hedging its bets. There will be restoration but there won't be
idols, even the ark of the covenant, because the Lord will be in their midst, a
glorious future.
The lame man
believes in healing, he believes it is dependent on getting into the pool when it
is disturbed. When Jesus asks if he
wants to be healed his response is to explain it hasn't yet, in thirty-eight
years been possible because no one is ever there to help him into the
waters. Is healing in the water or is it
the Lord? Jesus commands him to take up
his bed and walk and, surprisingly, the man obeys, walking into his own
healing. It is an amazing thing to
consider he hadn't walked in thirty-eight years, how atrophied must his legs
have been, and now he is able to not only walk but carry something else. That act of carrying a bed, however, has been
determined to be work and since it is Sabbath, work is sin. Why does he, when he learns Jesus is the one
who healed him, go immediately to the Pharisees and tell them? Jesus says that he should sin no more lest
something worse happen to him, was sin the cause of his condition? When Jesus says His Father is working until
this day, and so He can work also, they now condemn him not based on the man's
testimony, but His own, He made Himself equal with God, it wasn't all just a
misunderstanding, they knew who Jesus claimed to be.
If there is no God,
or if there is no judgment, where does restraint come from regarding the way we
conduct our lives? Paul says without God,
a righteous God who judges sin, there is no moral imperative. We can choose morality or we can choose
immorality, there is no absolute claim, it is all situational. Consequences are earthly not eternal. Paul says that is a lie, there will be
judgment. Is his statement, "He
will render to each one according to his works" a contradiction to the
doctrine of justification by faith? No. Paul says the righteous will "live"
by faith. In other words, life reveals
faith. If we believe his argument that
there will be a day of judgment, we will direct our lives in accordance with
God's Word, our lives will show that we believe both in judgment and in God's
Word. The Israelites to whom Jeremiah
was sent showed by their actions that they had not returned to the Lord, their
faith, or the lack thereof, was revealed by their continued offering of worship
to other gods. What does your life show?
No comments:
Post a Comment