The accusation the Lord lays against His people is that
while they “swear by the name of the Lord and confess the God of Israel” they
do so without knowledge, “not in truth or right.” We can indeed get ourselves off course in our
understanding of God. We can make Him
into the purveyor of health and wealth, we can believe in things like the
“word-faith” movement where what we speak binds God. We can be universalists, or any other vain
imagining that exalts our preferred god to the exclusion of the God as revealed
in the Bible and supremely in the Son.
Here, He says that not only has He revealed Himself in the past, He is
going to reveal something completely new, something they aren’t prepared for
and cannot say, “I knew that” when they see it.
We know that this prophecy is speaking ultimately about Jesus, something
so new that no one believed it was of God.
We, too, need to check ourselves on what we think we know. All of us, every one, need to re-appraise our
understanding of Jesus on a regular basis.
We become like Peter, believing that we have it all figured out, too
familiar with what we think we know to ever be challenged anew in our
understanding until, suddenly, it is all blown apart and we have a time of
exile in order to strip us down and humble us that we may truly exalt Him.
The crowd is gathered awaiting Jesus’ return from the other
side of the lake, over in Gentile territory and I wonder if they knew how
ritually unclean He was from the time in the tombs, the bloody demon-possessed
and then, ultimately, the pigs. The
press of the crowd was great as the synagogue ruler implored Jesus to come heal
his daughter was at the point of death and one woman, in faith, reached out to
touch the hem of Jesus’ garment in her desperation to be healed and received
what she sought. More ritual impurity to
be touched by this woman with the issue of blood and yet Jesus knew power had
gone out and she took yet another risk, identifying herself and risking the
disapprobation of the entire crowd, possibly even jeopardizing the healing of
the man’s daughter if he chose to enforce the purity law, and she received even
more when Jesus said her faith had made her whole. Finally, Jesus overcomes death in this girl
when everyone has lost hope. A new thing
indeed!
Paul begins the letter with a defense of his apostleship, “Paul,
an apostle—not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the
Father, who raised him from the dead..”
In Galatia Paul’s teaching was questioned more than elsewhere and this
letter is to put down the teaching of those who would lead the Galatian church
astray, towards law rather than Gospel.
Law and Gospel are not opposed in God, they are opposed in man. We have a hard time holding these two in
tension whereas God does not. Paul says
he has been there and done that, done it better than other people in fact but
that it all turned for him when he learned of grace in Jesus. He realized that he couldn’t keep the law
perfectly and that the only true righteousness the world had ever known he had
judged to be false. His faith was in a
revelation not a system of thought, that what he had done was the same God
accused the people of in Isaiah’s time, swearing by the name of the Lord and
confessing the God of Israel but not in truth or right.
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