"Will you condemn me that you may be in the right?" That, indeed, is what Job has been doing in
his speeches. He is so concerned with
his rightness that his only option was to say that God was in the wrong. He asked for a redeemer but that redeemer's
work was to plead Job's case in the face of God's unrighteous punishment of him
when he had done nothing to deserve it.
There is injustice in this world.
There are many things that will not make sense to us because we believe
ultimately in justice and fairness. We
can't imagine the intricacy of the web of sin and the scope of things which
work together in this life, the complexity of it all. I continually marvel that Abram and Sarai
conspired to have a child by her maidservant and that this decision taken four
thousand years ago by wandering Bedouins plays havoc with the world today as
the sons of Ishmael, the Muslims, and the sons of Isaac, the Jews, are at old
enmity with one another. The long view
of history stretching into eternity and the new creation is the only way to
reconcile these things. God gave Job
that picture.
The Jews are looking to arrest Jesus when He comes to
Passover, if He comes. They have spies
on the lookout for Him but we know that they will not need spies to find Him
when Jesus enters the city, it will be open and to extraordinary acclaim. First, six days before Passover, we find
Jesus back in Bethany at the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus, who had recently
been dead. I smile when I read the
words, " Martha served".
Lazarus reclines at table and then we find a strange word,
"therefore." Therefore Mary
took a pound of expensive ointment, nard, and began to anoint Jesus such that
the aroma filled the house. (here is the Wikipedia article
on nard, it grows only in the Himalayas and was therefore wildly
expensive). Judas is the dissenter, why
wasn't this sold for the benefit of the poor, like Jesus told the rich young
man to do with his earthly inheritance?
This time, Jesus says the poor will always be among us. Too often that is an excuse to do nothing for
the poor but what Jesus is saying is that this is a once in a lifetime or once
in history chance to serve Him directly, this is more important.
Sometimes splits happen in ministry. The disagreement between Paul and Barnabas
was over John Mark who seemingly lost heart when the going got tough. Paul isn't ready to forgive, forget and
restore while Barnabas, the man most responsible for Paul's own position (he
was the one who retrieved Paul and brought him to Antioch for his first mission
work), is prepared to move on and let the past go. Luke is content to not take sides in the
matter and see now two missionary teams going out. Along the way, Timothy joins Paul and Silas
and Paul demonstrates what he will later write in his letter to the
Corinthians, that we need to consider the weaker brother in our practices
. The Jerusalem Council has spoken and
not required circumcision but with Timothy, Paul chooses to circumcise him. Was this because he saw Timothy becoming a
leader and therefore wanted to remove any impediment to him being received as
leader? At any rate, Paul modified his
practice in order to avoid the inevitable arguments to Timothy. The long view sometimes calls us to do that
which we otherwise would find objectionable.
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