30 June 2013

Psalm 118; 1 Samuel 10:1-16; Rom. 4:13-25; Matt. 21:23-32

I wonder what Saul thought about the words of Samuel.  This is a very specific prophecy isn't it?  You will meet men with three goats and three loaves of bread, they will give you two of them.  You'll continue on to a certain place and as soon as you enter it will come a band of prophets with specific instruments.  Then, "the Spirit of the Lord will rush upon you, and you will prophesy with them and be turned into another man."  As soon as he began going where the Lord told him to go, away from Samuel, "God gave him another heart."  All these things happen in one day yet when he goes home and his uncle asked what Samuel had said to him, he only mentions, "Oh yeah, he said the donkeys are fine."  It seems that Saul didn't know what to make of all that happened to him.  What in the world does it mean that he will be turned into a new man and what happened when God gave him another heart?  What did it mean to be king over Israel, no one had ever done that before?  Sometimes you just have to process.

Jesus is challenged by the Pharisees, those who are the leaders of the people but who are stubborn with respect to the way of the Lord.  They ask who gave Jesus permission to teach and act as He has done with respect to the money changers yet Jesus will not answer.  It isn't a question of who gave authority, but whether they see the authority by the result.  They have the information necessary to know by what authority Jesus does these things, it is the authority of scripture that forces Him to clean the temple and teach the truth there for all to hear.  The little parable of the two sons, one who initially refuses to do his father's will and then repents and does it as over against the one who, to the father's face looks good but then fails to act, has an offensive application for the leaders.  Jesus says that everyone knows that acting is more important than speaking.  Repentance by tax collectors and prostitutes is more important than the faux righteousness of the Pharisees.  These will get into the kingdom ahead of the would-be leaders. 

Righteousness is faith, faith is righteousness.  We want to measure righteousness by what we see or do when in fact it is believing in what God is able to do and that what He promises will be done.  Faith in Him is all that is required because He alone is perfectly faithful.  We will always be disappointed and we will always disappoint.  We are sometimes those in the parable who say we will and then don't.  He is always good for His word and the faithfulness of Jesus, perfect fidelity to the Law, was the atonement for our unfaithfulness.  We who believe in Him are now inheritors of the promises.  Performance is no longer based on trying to be good enough to deserve God's love, it is based on desiring to please the One who loves you enough to die for you and whose love will never leave you.  The Spirit has come upon you and you have been turned into another person.

29 June 2013

Psalm 107:33-43, 108; 1 Samuel 9:15-10:1; Acts 7:30-43; Luke 22:39-51

Verse 16 sounds a great deal like Exodus 2.24-25, "God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the people of Israel—and God knew."  Samuel had gotten a word from the Lord about Saul before he ever met him and when he did see him, the Lord confirmed that this was the one.  God said he would be the one to restrain the people.  What does that mean?  A good king indeed does restrain the people from going astray, he is not restrained by the people but by God Himself.  The work for which Saul was particularly called was delivering the people from the yoke of oppression of the Philistines.  Samuel is quite coy with Saul, feeding him, lodging him, then sending him off before sending the servant away so that he could make the word of God known to him.  It is a private anointing then of this man as king.  There was no prescribed ceremony for the anointing of a king, only a priest. 

Remember that yesterday in our reading Peter was told that after he was restored his task was to strengthen his brothers.  Today, an angel appears to Jesus as He prays and the disciples sleep in order to strengthen Him.  This mission of strengthening was only possible for someone other than flesh and blood, flesh was failing and flesh didn't want to see this happen, they were sleeping for sorrow.  That is indeed a heavy sleep and while they sleep Jesus struggles with His fleshly desire to avoid this suffering, He was both God and man and the manly part of Him wanted no part of what comes next.  The angel then was a great mercy sent to encourage Him and prepare Him for this hour.  Even though Jesus knew what Judas was going to do, it was still a betrayal, not a determined thing, Judas acted on his own in betraying Jesus.  Satan had a way into Judas' heart and Judas, like Cain, failed to master the temptation that was crouching at his door.

Stephen recounts the story of Moses when God used the same verbs we saw in that first lesson and its parallel in Exodus.  God saw the affliction of His people, heard their groaning and came down to help them.  He helped them by sending Moses to them.  Moses could answer the question of who made him ruler and judge this time, God had done it!  This was authenticated by signs and wonders done in Egypt.  In Exodus 20, after the giving of the Ten Commandments, the people beg Moses to receive the rest of the Law on their behalf, they are afraid to come near to God, they delegate that work to Moses but when Moses doesn't return when they think he will, they give up and ask for other gods to be made.  Wouldn't it have been better if they had remained and heard the Law for themselves?  They had put their trust in Moses and not God.  It is amazing and a testament to God's lovingkindness and faithfulness that the nation lived beyond that day.  His covenant, however, is everlasting and dependent only on His faithfulness to endure.  He is always king whether recognized as such or not. 

28 June 2013

Psalm 102; 1 Samuel 9:1-14; Acts 7:17-29; Luke 22:31-38

Saul seems like the perfect king, wealthy, tall and handsome.  Straight out of a Hollywood fantasy.  He is on an errand for his father to find lost donkeys and perseveres in his work to the point where there is no food left.  His concern is for his father, he wants to return home lest his father become anxious over his lengthy absence, a good son.  His servant, however, knows that a man of God is frequently in the town near where they have traveled and yet even then Saul will not deign to approach this man without something to offer him, he is without presumption.  After that matter is settled, they go to the city (sounds a bit like the Wizard of Oz) and arrive just as Samuel is arriving. 

The disciples prove themselves a bit dense.  Peter hears Jesus say that satan wants him and that when he is turned again, repented of his failure and restored, he is to strengthen his brothers, lead them.  Peter knows better than that, his faith will not fail, he will remain steadfast to the end.  Wouldn't it be nice if we really were the people we truly want to be?  No, Peter will fail, but this must be the case, Jesus must be alone at the end of this journey, He must experience betrayal and Peter must be a betrayer in order that his own pride not ruin him in the end.  Jesus says that these times are a'changing.  Before He sent them out as innocents and dependents on the Father's provision knowing they would be safe.  Now, the world will come against them rather than receiving them and they must be prepared for this next phase of mission, the season of difficulties and hardships, the season of struggle and survival.  They will indeed find that there is opposition, suffering and in some cases, death.

The story continues with the people getting fat and happy in Egypt, settled in this foreign land with no thought for the land they had been promised four centuries before.  Then, a king arose who no longer remembered all that their ancestor Joseph had done to preserve and make mighty the kingdom of Egypt, one who would oppress them.  They had enjoyed a long season of prosperity and peace in Egypt and then came this king who came against them and caused them to cry out to this God to whom they had given little thought down the years.  He sent them a deliverer, Moses, with a fantastic backstory who finally, at forty years of age, decided to step into his destiny.  What he received for his willingness to serve was rejection and exile.  His story needed to be shaped by difficulty and doubt before he was truly ready to leave God's people.  It is all part of the preparation of a leader to persevere through difficulty and to fail sometimes.  Failure need not be final if we give it to Him.

27 June 2013

Psalm 105:1-22; 1 Samuel 8:1-22; Acts 6:15-7:16; Luke 22:24-30

I have mentioned before the problem in the Old Testament of "obeying the voice" of anyone else.  That little phrase is first seen in the Lord's accusation against Adam, that he obeyed the voice of his wife.  Throughout the Jacob stories we see him obeying the voice of his mother.  Here, God tells Samuel to obey the voice of the people in anointing them a king.  In doing so, Samuel is obeying the voice of God when he gives them a king.  Samuel certainly gives a solemn warning to the people concerning what kind of man this king will be.  Who in the world would say, at the end of that diatribe, give us such a king?  The people, however, refuse to obey the voice of Samuel in the matter, his influence over them has waned due to the failure of his two sons to be the men their father was in judging them.  They did the two things a judge couldn’t do, take bribes and pervert justice.  Finally, the Lord again commands Samuel to obey the voice of the people and now the transition to being like every other nation begins.

Jesus says the contours of His kingdom are dramatically different from the world's kingdoms.  The path to greatness, which is what the disciples seek, is different from that of the world.  The kings of the Gentiles (at this point the Israelites have no king, they are not sovereign in the Land, but subservient to the Romans) lord it over their people, exactly like Samuel was told the Israelite kings would do.  In the kingdom Jesus has in mind, the path to greatness is in serving rather than being served and He has shown the way.  Ultimately, He will show even more of the way of serving and loving.  I wonder, when he mentioned that the disciples would sit on thrones in the kingdom, judging the people, was the image of service still in their mind's eye? 

Stephen begins his sermon by recounting the early history of the nation.  Why?  History is important in that in order to understand who we are, or who we were intended to be, we must know what the founding fathers, in this case, the patriarchs, envisioned.  Israel's history, however, is different.  It isn't the vision of the founding fathers that is important, but the vision of the founding Father, Yahweh, that matters.  Stephen knows who the hero of the story is, God.  People make God's story a muddle by disobedience and a desire to be great rather than to allow the Lord to guide and direct at His will.  Abraham followed God in faith, believing that the Lord would and could do all He promised without seeing the fulfillment of the promises.  He was certainly not perfect, his affair with Hagar, when he obeyed the voice of his wife, produced the conflict that continues, 4000+ years later in the middle east and over the world, between the descendants of Abraham through Hagar and those of Sarah.  The mess created by internecine strife in the next couple of generations caused the people to be in the incubator known as Egypt for four hundred years before they were redeemed and the promise fulfilled.  Greatness is a characteristic only of the Lord.

26 June 2013

Psalm 101, 109; 1 Samuel 7:2-17; Acts 6:1-15; Luke 22:14-23

For twenty years the Israelites were under the yoke of the Philistines and the ark was in a place it didn't belong, Kiriath-jearim.  It would certainly seem that the real problem was that the people were not worshipping Yahweh as Samuel had to tell them to put away their idols and the gods of the Philistines.  It wasn't only the Philistines who were stubborn and hard-hearted.  The people, however, finally came to a place of repentance and seeking after the Lord after all these years of difficulty.  When the Philistines came against them they were afraid but they did the right thing, they asked Samuel to pray for them and then they saw the Lord's hand in favor of His people in accord with the promise through Moses that if they were wayward but returned with all their hearts, the covenant would be renewed.  They saw their deliverance from these oppressors and then we are told that Samuel judged the nation like a circuit-rider all the days of his life.

The new covenant is instituted in connection with the celebration of the old covenant.  At Passover Jesus re-interprets the symbols of the meal and the feast itself.  What was required for all time was the sacrifice of an animal and the consumption by the assembled family or, if the family wasn't large enough to consume the entire thing, additional people who were likewise situated.  The feast recollected the original Passover, brought it into the present in the celebration of what God had already done since that first night, and looks forward into the blessed future when they are permanently situated in the Land, the ultimate fulfillment of the promise of Messiah.  Communion recalls the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, His sacrifice and God's acceptance of that sacrifice.  It also is a time we recall what blessings we have received since we first accepted Jesus and looks forward to the eternal bliss.  We need not sacrifice, that is finished once and for all on the cross.  We need only offer ourselves, our repentance and our lives for His service.

The apostles need help with a rapidly growing church so they come up with the idea of deacons, those who minister or serve.  There are certain qualifications that these men must have.  They must be "men of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom."  Their job is to free the apostles for the work of prayer and teaching and study.  They handle the temporal matters of the church.  One of these men, Stephen, seems to have done a bit more than that, he was doing great wonders and signs among the people and it caught the attention of the leaders of the Jews.  They conspired against him just as they had done with Jesus and when they called him before the council, they saw an interesting sight, "his face was like the face of an angel."  Their charge against him was that he was changing the customs handed down.  Jesus had already done that at this final Passover, Stephen was simply being obedient.  Obedience to Jesus sometimes means we will be out of step with the world and even, at times, out of step with other religious people, it won't always make sense to everyone.