Have you ever felt like you were in God's cross hairs as the
hunted? That is what Job is
experiencing. He is wrong but that is
what he experiences. We can process
things incorrectly and miss cooperating with God for our own
sanctification. Job has one grid through
which to process this suffering and that is the same grid his friends use, it
is a result of sin, God's judgment against him.
He maintains his innocence, believes God is wrong in judging and
punishing him for sin, but that is his only position, his only way of
understanding pain and suffering. We know
that Job is suffering for his righteousness.
God is the one who said he was upright and blameless. Suffering messes up our theology. It makes us forget that God is good and that
we live in a broken and fallen world where there is no one to one
correspondence between sin and suffering.
Sometimes sin goes without a visible price and sometimes sin demands a
price that is far outsized. Suffering is
a given, we can choose how we endure it.
Job could maintain his innocence while also holding God blameless.
(We skipped the story of the woman caught in adultery. The passage is disputed because it is not in
the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament.
The narrative in John 8 is connected with the previous chapter. The Feast of Booths concludes with a festival
of lights.) Jesus is the light of the
world. There was a light created first
that Jewish sages say is the Torah itself and that it brings illumination to
the one who studies it but also it brings light when the student becomes also a
disciple of Torah, by doing as it commands.
That light gives light to the world, restores that original light that
is now gone from the world by sin. Jesus
is the Word and He is the light. They are
one and the same. John includes both in
the prologue to the Gospel. When He says
they do not know either Him or His Father, He is saying they study and they
believe they are following the Word of God but they are not, they are walking in
darkness, they have neither understanding nor righteousness. They have the light in that they have Torah,
but they gain nothing from it. Job, too
was mistaken about God. We can sometimes
practice magic instead of righteousness.
If we do this, God will or is obliged to do that.
The events at the home of Cornelius challenged the theology
of the church right from the start. Was this
an extension of Judaism or was it something new? They had thought, even though Jesus had ministered
to Gentiles on a couple of occasions, and had commended some Gentiles in the
Old Testament, that this was the fulfillment of the Jewish hope for a Messiah
of their very own. Others could
participate in the joy of their Messiah but only by aligning themselves with
the nation by circumcision and accepting the yoke of the Law. The dream said
something about the Law itself, that God was doing a new thing in so far as
food restrictions were concerned. What
then to make of this new thing and its application beyond Peter's personal
diet? What happened at Cornelius' house
further explained the vision, clean and unclean were things of the past, the
mission was what mattered. The Holy
Spirit would convict and change lives.
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