31 March 2015

Psalm 6, 12; Jer. 15:10-21; Phil. 3:15-21; John 12:20-26  

Jeremiah begins his complaint by decrying the unfairness of life.  He has neither borrowed nor lent yet all hate him, he is a man of strife and contention to the whole land.  The Lord isn’t exactly sympathetic, essentially asking, what did you think was going to happen.  The hardness of the hearts of the people was such that they could not hear the Lord but He sent Jeremiah anyway.  Jeremiah’s initial reaction to receiving the word of the Lord was sweet and so he set about the task of speaking them to the people but what he has found is that this is a bitter and lonely task and life.  He was happy to be alone in God’s service until indifference turned to persecution.  His plea is that the Lord will deliver him from them.  The promise He receives is that the Lord will protect the prophet but He does not promise that He will prosper his work.  It isn’t going to get better for Jeremiah but he will finish his work if he is faithful to the word of the Lord.  The life of a prophet can be difficult to say the least.

After continually telling people His time had not yet come, now, when the Greeks seek to see Him, Jesus says His time has come.  Remember how yesterday’s lesson ended?  The Pharisees pointed out that the “whole world” was going after Jesus.  We see the evidence of that in these people desiring to see Jesus.  These were Gentiles, possibly proselytes, who had come to Jerusalem for the feast, perhaps some of those who saw Him clearing the court of the Gentiles of the money changers, who now come and ask the disciples for an audience with the man himself.  Jesus’ words seem a complete paradox, the time has come to be glorified but also talk of death and dying.  The disciples surely thought there was something a bit amiss in this discourse.  At the moment when it would seem that it was all coming together Jesus insisted on this talk of death. 

What a strange place to begin a lesson, “Let those of us who are mature think this way…”  This way refers to the pressing on towards the prize, not taking for granted that we have already obtained it, continuing to pursue Christ-likeness.  Remembering that our true citizenship is in heaven is the best way to continue on that path, the same thing Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness…”  Paul here contrasts that with those whose minds are set on earthly things, whose god is their belly.  Those whose minds on set on heavenly things are unconcerned about glory here on earth, they are content to know that all this gets swallowed up in the end, the good and the bad, the pleasant and the painful, eternity is a long time.

30 March 2015

Psalm 51:1-20; Jer. 12:1-16; Phil. 3:1-14; John 12:9-19  

Jeremiah looks around him and sees that things aren’t right.  The wicked prosper at the expense of the righteous and he can’t make sense of that in light of the righteousness of a sovereign God.  The prophet sees what we all see, what even unbelievers see and yet he begins with an affirmation of God’s righteousness, not a question of whether God is righteous in light of what he sees.  When we come with truth and humility and ask for understanding we are approaching Him in the right way.  Whether our question is on behalf of ourselves, for something that has gone wrong in our lives, or in general, why is the world the way it is, why do children suffer and die for instance, if we come affirming truth in order that we might know more truth, we do well.  Jeremiah is told that not only does the Lord see what he sees, the Lord sees more than that and soon it will be judged, unfortunately for Israel, the “beloved of my soul.”  There is reassurance, however, that this is not a permanent rejection, ultimately there will be restoration.  Judgment will also fall on the unrighteous after the nation has been judged.  Justice sometimes waits.

What had Lazarus done that anyone would seek to kill him?  We think the reason John’s is the only Gospel that mentions the raising of Lazarus from the dead is that it was the last written and prior to that it was thought best to avoid raising the issue again for Lazarus’ safety and that by the time John wrote Lazarus had died.  Lazarus had done nothing, it was the very fact of his being, the witness of his life after being brought back from the dead that was an affront to the leaders, not because of Lazarus so much as because of Jesus.  Part of the motivation for the crowds shouting, “Hosanna”, literally, Lord save us, is that act of Jesus’ in raising Lazarus.  They have come to believe because of this miracle and now proclaim Him as king, and rightly so.  The Pharisees say that the world is going after Him and why do they care?  Why will they not believe?  Their righteousness is being judged in Jesus, the Lord has blessed Him in ways they cannot duplicate, just like the magicians in Egypt could not do as Moses did.  The Father sees more unrighteousness because He knows more of real righteousness.

Paul writes against those who would see themselves as righteous because of their obedience to the law, whom he refers to as “dogs, evildoers, those who mutilate the flesh.”  Jeremiah saw what seemed unrighteous to him and made his complaint to the Lord who then said there was more than the prophet saw that was unrighteous, the same thing Habakkuk experienced.  Paul says that what looks like righteousness to some is simply evil when compared to true righteousness.  All this sort of righteousness, Paul says, he now sees as rubbish (the actual word is far more graphic) and as loss because of “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.”  The righteousness we need, the only real righteousness, comes from faith.  We can’t have that, however, so long as we hold onto any other notion of righteousness.  Any other form is a barrier to faith and, therefore, salvation.

29 March 2015

Psalm 24, 29; Zech. 9:9-12; 1 Tim. 6:12-16; Matt. 21:12-17  

To a world torn by war could there be anything more comforting than one who brings peace?  We are so fortunate that we live in a place where war is a distant thing, something that happens somewhere else and only tangentially touches most of us.  I have exactly one friend my age who has died in war.  Part of that is timing but part is that my friends tend not to have been in the military.  For the Middle East, then and now, war and death by violence in combat of one sort or another has always been a way of life.  Zechariah saw a day when the Messiah would come and bring peace, riding in on a donkey rather than a horse, humbly coming to claim the kingdom.  If we think we are weary of war and rumors of war, imagine how those in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Jerusalem must feel.  We need Him to come back and establish everlasting peace but the Bible tells me that it will get much worse before it gets better.

Jesus enters the city in fulfillment of Zechariah’s prophecy and then goes to the temple, judgment begins at the house of God.  His work is to make clear the way to the Lord by clearing from her courts the profiteers, those who will make money on the desire of pilgrims to make sacrifice at the temple in obedience to the commandment.  They will need animals that will be acceptable to the priests, and they can provide pre-approved sacrificial animals.  They will also need to pay the temple tax with the currency you can only use there and these are ready to provide the exchange, at a price of course.  Matthew puts it all in perspective, “But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying out in the temple, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” they were indignant…”  What others thought wonderful caused the leaders to be indignant, they wanted none of it.  Are we for peace and are we willing to have Him challenge us in this way?

Paul admonishes Timothy to fight the good fight of faith, the faith that is contained in the “good confession”, the confession of Jesus as lord, the confession of His death as the atoning sacrifice for sin, His resurrection as the seal of its acceptability to the Father, and the ascension to the right hand of the Father where He lives to make intercession for us.  The commandment of which Paul speaks likely refers to Timothy’s way of life, to never bring dishonor on the faith by his conduct. In that attitude, we wait for the day of His appearing in power and glory as the King of kings and Lord of lords.  That peace Zechariah saw Him bringing is meant to be established now in us through the indwelling Holy Spirit.  We have peace because we have confidence. 

28 March 2015

Psalm 137, 144; Jer. 31:27-34; Rom. 11:25-36; John 11:28-44

Who is the new covenant with?  We tend to think it is with the church but the Lord says that this new covenant will be with the house of Israel.  That refers us back to yesterday’s lesson from Romans that we Gentiles are grafted into the covenant while the Jews are the native stock into which we are grafted.  There will be a change in this new covenant, they will not be punished for the sins of the fathers, the law will be put within, written on the heart.  The basis for the covenant will be the forgiveness of sin.  They will all know Him, from the least to the greatest.  Remember a few days ago, the Lord brought a charge against the great that they have a greater responsibility to make Him known because they have the means and leisure to study and know.  In the new covenant, all will know because the Spirit will be given without regard to greatness or smallness.  What a wonderful thing!

Apparently the sisters had been commiserating with one another concerning Jesus as they both greet Him the same way, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  It is both high praise and a question, why hadn’t He come when they sent word.  There is faith all around, the mourners appreciate Jesus’ weeping as a sign of love but also ask whether love might not have impelled Him to come and heal Lazarus as He had healed the blind man.  Faith stops at the door of the tomb, however.  Martha isn’t prepared to open it, her brother is beyond hope now, it has been four days.  At His reminder that if they believed they would see the glory of God, however, they were willing to believe and open the tomb.  Glory indeed!

I love the fact that Paul has done serious theological work for eleven chapters in Romans, sorting out the mysteries of election and salvation.  He has proven that faith is the key to salvation and that it is all about the mercy of God or it is not salvation.  He has proven that all, inside or outside the covenant, have sinned and are deserving of death, we are all rebels and enemies of God.  Here at the end of that you can hear the man’s heart for the salvation of the Jews, the very ones who have persecuted him and attempted to prevent the Gospel going to the Gentiles.  He wants to see them believe in Jesus and be restored, the call and election are irrevocable, this will happen and Paul wants to see it.  As he wraps it all up, all he can do is praise God, “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!... For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” Indeed!

27 March 2015

Psalm 22; Jer. 29:1,4-13; Rom. 11:13-24; John 11:1-27

Jeremiah writes a letter to the exile community in Babylon to comfort and encourage them in their suffering.  His word is to settle in for the long haul, build houses, let your kids get married, do life, seek the prosperity of the city, don’t huddle among yourselves and create a little Jewish ghetto. The promise is that they will be there for seventy years, longer than nearly any of them are likely to live.  They won’t be coming back but, like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob before them, they will live in faith that their ancestors will be in the land.  Their exile is nearly twice the amount of time their fathers spent in the wilderness.  We live in exile from our true home and this same advice should be heard by us, not just the promise to bless and prosper.  We are to be good citizens, taking an active part in blessing the places where we’re exiled.  The Jewish people have done this now for a couple thousand years in all the places they have been exiled and frequently, their prosperity has been great enough to arouse persecution against them.  In some ways we learn to be exiles by observing their ways.

Jesus seems not to care very much about the problems of his friends in Bethany, doing nothing when they send news of Lazarus’ sickness for the first two days.  This reaction is very much like what we see in John 2 at Cana when Mary puts her problem to Jesus at the wedding and also John 7 when his brothers suggest He go up to the Feast of Booths and initially Jesus demurs but then goes.  He moves at the impulse of the Spirit and this time is no different.  The miracle is enhanced by the delay.  The disciples don’t understand why He wants to go since the last time they were there the people were prepared to stone Jesus and they are aware that as His disciples they will come in for similar scrutiny.  Ultimately, Thomas says, “Let’s go and die with Him.”  Martha’s greeting is accusatory, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died but Jesus calls her to a higher faith even than that.  She makes her confession that He is “the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”  That He is resurrection and life are included in that idea but not until the last day.

Certainly we are to have an attitude towards the Jews that respects the reality that we are grafted into the covenant by faith but it is they into which we have been grafted.  As with Hosea’s child, we were once not a people and not loved and now we are because of the rejection of the Jews for their rejection of Jesus.  Our prayer should be for them to believe as we stand in faith.  Paul says that we are nourished by the root which is Judaism and it is important for us to know those roots and appreciate them while simultaneously realizing that the knowledge they possessed and possess does not lead them to Jesus, it is the Spirit which makes that possible.  The faith that led them to expect to return after seventy years in Babylon and rebuild the city and the temple is the faith that we have in the resurrection from the dead, we have been there and seen that in Jesus.  We remember what He has done in the past to give us hope for the future.

26 March 2015

Psalm 131, 132; Jer. 26:1-16; Rom. 11:1-12; John 10:19-42

Can’t you just see Jeremiah’s reaction to the Lord’s command to stand in the court of the temple and preach repentance to a people who have refused correction?  He surely knew that this wasn’t going to go well or bear fruit.  He was a lone voice among the prophets, the only voice it seems who was telling the truth of God to the nation.  His prophecy was that if they refused to heed this warning this temple would be like Shiloh, ruined and abandoned, and that, as we know from the Gospels, won’t sit well with religious people.  They never believe in judgment beginning at the house of God in spite of the fact it is all through the Word.  The first reaction of the officials, after the people have gathered round Jeremiah, is to say that he deserves death for speaking against the temple.  Sound familiar?  Ultimately, however, Jeremiah claims to speak for the Lord and now they aren’t as certain about the death penalty.  He might be and that isn’t a risk they are prepared to take.

The “Jews” ask Jesus to tell them plainly whether or not He was Messiah and Jesus refuses to say “yes” or “no.”  He does, however, say things like, “I give them (my sheep) eternal life”, “I and the Father are one”, and that He is the one “whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world.”  He points to the works He has done and is doing as witnesses to who He is but certainly these statements are simple to parse as claims to being Messiah.  They don’t know what to make of Him and the one statement they find to be blasphemy is taken away by His quoting other Scripture in defense.  Just as with Jeremiah, they can’t say for certain He isn’t speaking for the Lord, better safe than sorry at the moment.

Paul is clear that some within Israel, a remnant, are the elect while others are not.  His point is that the nation as a whole has not been rejected, that is an impossibility because election is a permanent thing because the covenant is everlasting.  The promises of God to Israel are irrevocable.  To participate in that covenant and to receive its blessings, however, one must believe, have faith in Him, not believe based on works that make you deserving.  When Jesus claimed to be one with the Father it required then that you believe not only in the Father but in the Son, not a new requirement, He made the Father known and therefore to believe in the Son as the exact representation of the Father is to believe in the Father Himself.  You can’t disbelieve in the one who makes the Father known and believe in the one made known.  Rejection of Jesus is rejection of truth and the Father is truth.  There are some in Israel who are being saved, will always be and have always been.  All have never participated fully in the covenant, only those who participate by faith.

25 March 2015

Psalm 119:145-176; Jer. 25:30-38; Rom. 10:14-21; John 10:1-18

The judgment of the Lord is announced and it will affect the entire earth, from one end to the other.  This sounds a lot like the days of Noah doesn’t it?  No nation is untouched by this judgment which Jeremiah announces.  It is a fearsome thing to contemplate such a day.  We have led fortunate lives in the United States.  Not since we turned on ourselves 150 years ago have we known war within the boundaries of the nation.  There have been devastations of war on other continents where we have lost millions of lives but our peaceful existence has been sure.  We lost half a million people in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.  We have experienced Dust Bowls and financial crashes but we keep on as though something happened but our equilibrium is barely disturbed and soon we are back to business as usual.  That sounds also like the days of Noah and the days described in Revelation.  Do we hear God’s warning?  If not we will pay the price for our failure.

Safety is found in Jesus.  The good shepherd is the one who gives safety to the flock.  He is willing to risk his own life for the life of the sheep and they know it.  The sheep know that the only place for them to find security and safety is in the shepherd.  He has proven himself to them and they know, listen for, and obey his voice.  Sometimes in a sheepfold there is no proper door, the shepherd lies across the entrance as a door, you have to get past him to get to the sheep.  There are false shepherds but there is, in Jewish thought, but one good shepherd, the one who has promised through the prophets that He  will come and shepherd the sheep.  Jesus’ words echo that promise and they should also have caused them to remember that when the Lord comes to shepherd His sheep it is a rebuke to the shepherds who are leading at the time.  If we believe in God’s judgment we need to shelter with the shepherd.

Paul sees the ingathering of the Gentiles as a means of grace towards the Jews.  They have rejected the One He sent and they have rejected His message.  John wrote, “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him.”  Paul affirms that they neither received Him nor His message and his hope is that the Gentiles coming into the covenant will be the goad necessary to get the nation to re-evaluate Jesus and accept Him as Messiah.  Paul clearly believes that the Lord has not rejected Israel, He continues to hold out His hands to them in spite of the hardness of their hearts.  Let us not be found guilty of a hardness of heart or hearing, instead, let us listen for His voice and obey only His voice.

24 March 2015

Psalm 121, 122, 123; Jer. 25:8-17; Rom. 10:1-13; John 9:18-41

The people addressed here are those who refused to leave Jerusalem and go to Babylon, those who held on to what was familiar and remained in the land under the leadership of Zedekiah after he cut his deal with Nebuchadnezzar.  Exile was God’s plan and He announced it to be His way through Jeremiah.  Those who remained were disobedient because they preferred the familiar to a life of faith when it no longer made sense to them.  The Lord here announces that the devastation of Jerusalem will be complete, there will be nowhere left to hide or stay and these will be scattered, no longer a people, a worse fate than being in exile.  The nations that harbor them will themselves come under judgment and be overrun.  The only safe place will be together in Babylon which itself will come under judgment.  There will be times in our lives perhaps when things don’t make sense, when God will call us to go or stay and we will be confused and anxious, the only thing to do is be obedient and have faith. 

In this passage of the healing of the blind man we tend to focus on the ironies and paradoxes of sight.  The man was born blind, never having seen and yet he sees what the Jewish leaders cannot see, ultimately Jesus says they are blind even though they have the physical sense of sight.  They lack real sight, spiritual sight.  The other problem in the passage is what people know.  The leaders say they know this man is a sinner.  The parents stick to what they know, this is their son, and he was born blind.  The man himself doesn’t know if the man who healed him is a sinner but he does know that “though I was blind, now I see.”  The leaders know that God had spoken to Moses and they don’t know where He comes from (why does that matter?).  The man gets the thing right when he says, We know that God does not listen to sinners, but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does his will, God listens to him. Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”  Their final retort is a statement of the fact they “know”, “You were born in utter sin.”  That fact is where we came into this man’s story, on a fact that wasn’t a fact at all.  They’re still trying to make sense of the world based on faulty information.

Paul picks up on this theme of knowing as the problem with his fellow countrymen, the Jews, coming to faith, “I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.”  He goes on to say they are ignorant of the righteousness of God which is the most damning indictment possible since they alone have the law which defines sin, which can be seen as the opposite of righteousness and therefore reveals righteousness.  To steal an illustration from GK Chesterton, that is like deciding that white is not a color but the absence of color.  To define righteousness as the absence of sin is to get righteousness wrong, it has a character apart from the absence of sin, a character all its own.  Their way of defining righteousness caused them to miss real righteousness in Jesus.  This, Paul calls the righteousness of faith as opposed to the righteousness of the law.  Ultimately, the righteousness of faith is what we must have.  We can stay behind and keep Jerusalem in the short term or we can pick up our cross and follow Jesus and have the eternal one.

23 March 2015

Psalm 31; Jer. 24:1-10; Rom. 9:19-33; John 9:1-17

The Lord gives Jeremiah a vision of two baskets of figs, one very good bunch of figs and another very bad bunch.  He also gives the interpretation.  The good figs are those who have gone into exile and they will be brought back to the land when the time comes.  They will be like the Israelites in Egypt, they will be built up and their time of exile will be for good, they will prosper in the land of Babylon prior to returning.  The other bunch of figs, the spoiled ones, will be “a horror to all the kingdoms of the earth, a reproach, a byword, a taunt, and a curse.”  On these He will bring, “sword, famine, and pestilence.”  Why is that?  The king, Zedekiah, was a vassal of Nebuchadnezzar, a puppet regime.  He had made a deal with the devil, the king of Babylon, rather than aligning himself with the Lord and the Lord’s people.  He had taken what Jesus would not, the kingdom on the terms of the world rather than on God’s terms.  He had failed and in so doing, brought dishonor on the Lord.  Those who remained had made the same bargain and so had aligned themselves against the Lord.

The idea that suffering is inextricably connected with sin is an old one.  We know that it goes back as far as Job because Job pleaded his case based on his righteousness.  He was righteous therefore he should not suffer.  His friends case rested on the idea that his suffering revealed that he was not as righteous as he pretended to be.  The disciples here ask the question concerning the blind man, who sinned, him or his parents that he was born blind.  In truth, we should all be born blind because of both our own sins and that of our parents if there is such a correlation.  What we see sometimes depends on our presuppositions.  The disciples had theirs, the Pharisees had theirs and missed an incredible miracle because Jesus didn’t keep Sabbath when he healed the man born blind.  Their blindness made them miss the work of God and they thought they were on His side in the matter.

Jesus is the stone of stumbling, the Greek word is scandalon.  There is something intentional about the stone of stumbling, more like a trap door than simply a stone in the path.  Paul’s argument here concerns just how the Lord has “rejected” Israel in order that the Gentiles can come into the covenant.  It is incomprehensible that Israel could be rejected, the covenant is irrevocable, so Paul says that for a time this door is opened for the Gentiles to come in and who are we to question the Lord.  In the first lesson there is sin, the failure to align with His agenda for the people in exile.  In the second, there is misunderstanding over sin by the disciples first and then the leaders.  Ultimately they tripped up on the stone of stumbling, missing the forest for the trees, the law of Sabbath trumped this incredible healing and they missed the Messiah.  Where is our legalism or our compromise with the world causing us to stumble?

22 March 2015

Psalm 118; Jer. 23:16-32; 1 Cor. 9:19-27; Mark 8:31-9:1

Jeremiah’s word here is that the people are not to listen to the others who call themselves prophets when they prophesy that no harm shall come to the nation.  True prophets call for repentance, they don’t support and encourage those who are bent on following their own ways and because these prophets have not been in the council of the Lord and have not spoken truth concerning their conduct to the people, there has been no repentance.  The time now has come, there is no averting it, for judgment, it is too late to repent and the prophets have to bear the blame since they failed to warn the people in a timely manner.  In my former work in litigation, there were three things that had to be established: someone failed in their duty, there was loss to the party to whom the duty was owed, and the failure caused the loss.  The simple parts were the first two, the most difficult was establishing the link between the failure and loss.  Here, the Lord says the prophets’ failure led to the judgment, causation is declared. 

The first and most important thing we have to do in hearing from the Lord is to let our own agenda go.  Peter had a problem with that when Jesus began talking about what will happen next.  Jesus tells of His suffering, that He will be killed and three days later will rise again.  All these are true but Peter knows better.  Like the people who couldn’t accept that Jesus was Messiah because they “knew” He was from Galilee or Nazareth, Peter “knew” all about Messiah and what he knew didn’t allow for suffering and death, much less resurrection.  It all sounded crazy and Jesus needed to be educated so that He wouldn’t say such things.  Peter got a strong rebuke and a lesson in what it meant to be a disciple of Jesus.  To take up your cross and follow is to accept that you are a dead man walking.  My agenda of self-preservation and self-promotion has to go if I am to be aligned with Him. 

Paul tells the Corinthians that it is reasonable for one who preaches the Gospel to be compensated for this work.  Apparently they have not been willing to provide for those who preach and teach.  Paul himself does not avail himself of this right but that does not mean that others are less spiritual or wrong for expecting it.  Certainly it can be a problem and can produce prophets for hire rather than truth tellers as it is always tempting to tickle the ears of those whose ability to increase the pot.  I know that in my own life there have been times when I was told that I should preach this instead of that and where tithes were withheld in order to manipulate me but in the end I find that so long as I am faithful to preach what He says things may be difficult but He provides what we need.  Faithfulness to Him rather than men is the important thing.

21 March 2015

Psalm 107:33-43, 108; Jer. 23:9-15; Rom. 9:1-18; John 6:60-71

Jeremiah’s reaction to the word of the Lord is to be completely undone, “My heart is broken within me; all my bones shake; I am like a drunken man, like a man overcome by wine, because of the Lord and because of his holy words.”  The focus here is, “Both prophet and priest are ungodly; even in my house I have found their evil…”  Yesterday the focus was on the priests, the shepherds of God’s people.  Today, the Lord singles out the “prophets” of the nation, those who would speak on His behalf.  We have both prophets and priests in our day as well, those who would divide the written word, what has God said, and those who would interpret the times in light of that word, what is God saying today.  Sometimes that is the pastor but I have also known many who speak on behalf of God for today, some truly and others from their own hearts.  Here, the people are misled by the prophets concerning good and evil, perhaps the material blessings indicated to the prophets that all was well and God was pleased in spite of their sinfulness.  The people weren’t getting right information on which to evaluate themselves from those who would speak for the Lord.  Calamity will fall on these first, their ways will be darkened. 

“This is a hard saying, who can listen to it?” Some in the crowd of those who were “disciples” asked this question because indeed what Jesus had just said was a “hard saying.”  It was hard in two ways, the base, physical description of feeding on His flesh but that wasn’t the real problem the crowd posed was it?  Their problem was that they knew Jesus’ parents so how could He claim to be bread from above?  Jesus points back to that here in His response, “…what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?”  Because of this claim some turned away and He had to ask the twelve if they, too, were thinking of walking away.  Peter’s answer was pitch perfect, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, 69 and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”  He couldn’t possibly have understood what Jesus meant by eating His flesh and drinking His blood but he wasn’t going to let that get in the way of what he had come to believe.  You would think Jesus would be satisfied with that and congratulate him but a true prophet cannot do that, He had to speak the truth about their “belief” and about these men so that one could examine himself in truth.

Paul proves himself a true prophet in these words – “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kinsmen according to the flesh.”  He loves those who have rejected and persecuted him for his message of Jesus.  He does not hate those who are his brothers but see themselves as his enemies.  He has to tell them the truth no matter the personal cost out of love.  The mystery of election is a comfort to Paul in this matter.  He realizes that the salvation of Jew and Gentile alike is down not to human exertion on his part or the part of those who would depend on their efforts Godward, but on God Himself, who has mercy.  Paul rests in the sovereignty of God not to give God a pass but to say He not only can do as He pleases, but that there is much we can’t know about why God does what He does.  His thoughts are not our thoughts, nor His ways our ways.

20 March 2015

Psalm 102; Jer. 23:1-8; Rom. 8:28-39; John 6:52-59

The leaders/shepherds are singled out as problematic.  They have led scattered the flock, literally driven them away, and not attended to them.  Shepherds have a responsibility to keep the flock together and to attend to their various needs.  The 23^rd Psalm makes clear, even to those of us not in societies where there are shepherds and sheep present to us, what the good shepherds do.  The shepherds of Israel have not attended the sheep, they have only provided what is necessary, the fire and altar for sacrifice, and they have not done the work of loving and attending.  When we separate ourselves from those the Lord has given us to lead and shepherd, and all of us have been given others in our various relationships, we fail both them and Him.  How wonderful is His promise, “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.”  His Name? The Lord is our righteousness.  Just what we need.

To accept the words of Jesus here at face value is to be shocked beyond the ability to comprehend.  Four times he speaks of eating or feeding in this passage and yet Jesus uses different verbs for this eating.  When He speaks of what their fathers did in eating manna in the wilderness Jesus uses a very common verb that just means eat.  When, however, He speaks of what must be done with His flesh He uses a less common, more intense descriptor that connotes gnawing and tearing like an animal with a bone that has some meat on it.  So “eats” or “ate” points to something like a meal with knives, forks and spoons while the word translated “feeds” tells us that we must work more at it, spend time, but it is a very physical process.  The feeding on Jesus is more than we make of it, it requires us to slow down, work, and savor.  It has implications for both life and what we call the Eucharist.

The Lord is our righteousness, not our accuser.  Paul gives hope, that we shall persevere and that no matter what the world, the flesh and the devil throw at us, it is all working together for good for those who are called according to His purpose and in all this we are more than conquerors.  The one who could accuse us, the one who is without sin and therefore could cast the first stone, Jesus, loved us and died for us and now lives to make intercession on our behalf.  The lamb that appears before the throne is also the Great Shepherd of the sheep if we feed on Him, another great paradox of the faith.  The one we killed now gives us life if we eat His flesh and drink His blood.  We must take our time with this idea, this paradox, not check off the box of understanding, it is a far greater mystery than that, and deserves our constant attention and meditation. 

19 March 2015

Psalm 69; Jer. 22:13-23; Rom. 8:12-27; John 6:41-51

The more we want of the things of this world, the more compromised we are.  The Lord says that the nation has gotten rich but that the cost is too great, their wealth has accumulated at the expense of the poor laborer.  We live in a time of great income inequality and the economic system the Lord set up for His people would never have allowed such inequality to exist for a long period of time.  If they had observed the Sabbath and Jubilee years there would never have been a permanent aristocracy and a permanent underclass.  The Lord’s plan had a reset button as well as a means of throttling the economy.  To give up production every seven years would allow the land to rest and it would have the effect of minimizing the disparity in wealth.  Can you imagine our modern worldwide economy, particularly the stock exchanges and currency exchanges if a country said, every seven years our businesses will shut down?  As I have said many times, the biggest snare to God’s people is always prosperity.

How did He go from their wanting to make Him king to, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?”  He made a claim to be the bread from heaven and the gig was up.  They had seen the signs and now Jesus denied them the sign they proposed and it was over.  They were thinking like materialists, they wanted more of earth when He was offering them more of heaven.  We default to earthly things because we think of spiritual things as less substantial or important, certainly less immediate.  Jesus makes it clear that such is the state of all humanity unless the Father draws us.  We are unable to rise above the physical and immediate without the Holy Spirit working in us to want the higher and spiritual things.  It is a paradox that “the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  The mystery of the Word made flesh is in that paradox.  What does that paradox have to say about our flesh when we are in Christ Jesus?

The work of much of the first half of the book of Romans is to solve the question I just posed.  We are debtors to the Spirit and therefore we are to live by the Spirit and not the flesh.  Gratification of the desires of the flesh when they oppose the Spirit is to denigrate the value of what Jesus has done and it is to grieve the Holy Spirit, to devalue the gift He has given to us.  How much of our sinfulness is due to fear as Paul says here?  Our fears of belonging cause us to act in ways that make us acceptable to men.  Our fears of the future cause us to compromise in the present and they cause us to attend to and seek after not the kingdom of God but the kingdom of man, cause us to become lovers of money.  Our fears are our weaknesses and Paul says the Spirit helps us in our weaknesses.  Let us today set our hearts and minds on the things of the Spirit that we may be the revelation the world has been waiting for, the children, true children, of God.

18 March 2015

Psalm 101, 109; Jer. 18:1-11; Rom. 8:1-11; John 6:27-40

The Lord says He is shaping disaster against His people yet shows Jeremiah a potter whose first attempt with the clay didn’t turn out right.  The response of the potter wasn’t to throw away the clay but to reshape it into something else.  What did the Lord say would be the catalyst for Him to reshape the future of the nation?  Repentance.  That was exactly what they were told right back at the dedication of the temple, that if they would turn from their wicked ways and repent, He would hear and heal the land.  He is always willing to relent and to heal, bless and forgive if we are willing to repent.  His love is such that He takes misshapen clay like us and make us into something new, both useful and beautiful.  We are never spoiled beyond His ability to do this work.

“What must we do to be doing the works of God?”  That was the question the people asked when Jesus told them not to work for that which perishes.  His response was that they are simply to believe.  They want a sign that if Jesus is that guy, the One sent by God, He will show them.  Remember, they followed Him here because of the signs He was doing with the sick and then they saw a sign just the day before that caused them to want to make Him king.  When I get to McDonalds, having followed the interstate signs, I don’t sit in the parking lot under the golden arches asking for another sign so that I will really know I can get something to eat there.  Their request, “Moses gave us manna…” proves His initial accusation against them was true, you’re here for the bread that doesn’t satisfy and offers them as He offered the Samaritan woman, that which gives life.  That bread, He says, is me and if you believe you will have life.  The last paragraph is very clear as to the claim He is making isn’t it?

The first seven chapters are an indictment against Jews and Gentiles alike, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ending with Paul’s plea for salvation from this body of death.  Chapter 8 begins with the Gospel, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”  The indictment says guilty, the judge says yes, but there is no condemnation for sin for those who believe in the Son, sin was condemned on the cross and the penalty paid in the willing sacrifice of Jesus.  That means we can now be reshaped according to the Spirit.  Now that sin has been dealt with and the Spirit given, we can turn away from the desires of the flesh.  Justification is complete at the cross, sanctification, the process of reshaping, begins there.  

17 March 2015

Psalm 97, 99; Jer. 17:19-27; Rom. 7:13-25; John 6:16-27

Why was the Lord particularly concerned with the bearing of burdens on the Sabbath?  Typically, it indicates that people are carrying out the work of business.  Work of any sort is prohibited on the Sabbath but the carrying of burdens is singled out here and in other prophetic writings the people are condemned for the carrying out of business on the Sabbath, money, profit, business, were more important than keeping the Lord’s day.  Sabbath is an important concept, established right at the beginning of creation, and what it says is that our lives are not our own, we need a day’s rest from our labors but we need more than that, we need a day to contemplate and celebrate His goodness.  What would it look like if Christians began choosing to keep a Sabbath?  What would that witness look like?  Chick-Fil-A does it and they don’t seem to be suffering.  The picture the Lord paints here is that if they keep Sabbath they will see prosperity, blessing and peace and if they do not, they will see destruction.  Is that incentive enough?  Apparently it wasn’t.

If I were out on the sea in rough weather and a friend came walking across the water and said, “It is I; do not be afraid”, I am not sure I would be comforted and less fearful.  I might, in fact, be even more afraid.  They were glad to take Jesus in and when they did, they immediately came to land.  Jesus’ response to the peoples’ query about when he had crossed the lake was certainly less than inviting, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.”  These were the ones on whom He had shown compassion the prior day and now His attitude is quite cynical, challenging.  Working for the food that perishes is a reference to Isaiah 55, “Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?”  It is an invitation to come and listen, to hear the word of the Lord.  Jesus is saying their motives are no longer the same as yesterday.  Before, they followed because of what they saw Him do for others, the sick, now it is what He can do for them.

What should have been obvious to me, what constitutes sin, is reinforced by the Law.  It makes it more sinful to know that God says it is wrong.  When we talk about things like murder, adultery, bearing false witness and theft, we are all in agreement that these things are wrong, whether we know the commandments or not.  Knowing that there are few things that are specified in the law as sinful should tell us even more about those things, it should amplify them, that they might become “sinful beyond measure” as Paul says.  We don’t just think they’re wrong, we know it.  Our flesh is corrupted by original sin and yet we know, both instinctively and because of the law, what sin is and yet we find it tempting.  The struggle between spirit and flesh calls for us to do as Cain was instructed, “sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.” He gave us the Holy Spirit to enable us to do so, let us live by the power of the Spirit.

16 March 2015

Psalm 89:1-18; Jer. 16:10-21; Rom. 7:1-12; John 6:1-15

Do you get the feeling that the most offensive thing to God is denial of sin?  When Jeremiah announces the Lord’s judgment on the nation their response is to ask what they have done to deserve this.  The response is that it is due to their fathers’ going after other gods and their own stubbornness in following their own desires, refusing to listen to Him at all.  It doesn’t seem fair to punish them for their fathers’ sins and yet the problem is that the fathers’ turning away to other gods has now caused this generation to be so far removed from truth that they can’t hear or understand.  I think we see a great deal of that in our society today.  Because my generation decided to do what felt right we have then excused nearly everything and have no moral authority remaining.  Unless we repudiate our philosophy and deal with the sin in our lives honestly and humbly, we cannot recover any moral authority in the church today.  We have to actually turn back the clock on issues like divorce before we can have anything useful to say regarding marriage.  We can choose to repent or we can choose the wilderness.  The good news, then and now, is that ultimately God will restore a remnant.

John says, “a large crowd was following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing on the sick.”  He doesn’t say that they were believing Jesus to be Messiah because of that but they were following because of the signs.  Signs on the interstate tell us where to get something, food, gas, lodging, but in order to enjoy what is offered we have to commit to the exit.  These people were intrigued by the signs and looking for the next one, so Jesus had compassion on them, they were seeking.  After He feeds them John tells us, “When the people saw the sign that he had done, they said, “This is indeed the Prophet who is to come into the world!”  They interpret the sign and make a commitment to Him but they want to make Him king and so Jesus withdraws alone.  His popularity was never greater and yet their interpretation is wrong, it is simply a temptation to what satan promised, not what the Father wanted.  A king who takes care of my needs is what I would prefer but God gave us so much more.

In an oblique way, Paul is pointing to the garden.  Sin, he says, “seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.”  The law doesn’t produce covetousness for example, what it does is to connect with the sin nature of desire inside me and causes me to focus on the prohibition in the same way it aroused the desire in Adam and Eve for the forbidden fruit.  It causes us to think of the forbidden thing as good and desirable rather than God as good.  We have to make a choice, do we believe that thing is good because it is forbidden or that God is good and forbids for our good.  When we begin to choose the forbidden things we are going further astray from the true good.  The grace of God and the spirit of God in us free us from the law that causes that sin nature to raise up within us to desire the good, the true good, we see the prohibition as evidence of His goodness.  We can repent.

15 March 2015

Psalm 66, 67; Jer. 14:1-9,17-22; Gal. 4:21-5:1; Mark 8:11-21

There is drought and therefore famine in the land.  Why?  It is part of God’s judgment against His people that He withholds the blessing of rain in due season and from there everything goes downhill, prosperity is lost.  This judgment is God’s way of getting their attention.  Baal was a god who it was believed brought the rain which made the land fruitful and frequently the prophets bring the accusation against the nation that they are worshipping Baal and giving him credit for what is Yahweh’s doing.  There is recognition at the end of the passage that the people have greatly sinned, none have understanding and a plea for God, for His Name’s sake, not to abandon the nation and the confession, “Are there any among the false gods of the nations that can bring rain? Or can the heavens give showers? Are you not he, O Lord our God?     We set our hope on you, for you do all these things.”  Is there any place in your life where you are failing to set your hope on the one who is the giver and provider of all good things?

What has happened just before our lesson begins that Jesus sighs deeply in His spirit when He is asked for a sign?  He has just fed four thousand people with seven loaves of bread and a few small fish.  Was that not a sign?  If you can’t see the signs He is giving what difference would another sign make?  It is a symptom of every age to ask for a sign.  The attitude, “what have you done for me lately” is characteristic of human nature.  Beginning in Genesis 3 we see that attitude, that we seek outside God for all things.  We don’t fully believe in His goodness or His greatness and that becomes the catalyst for going astray in search of what we want somewhere else.  We’ve all had times in our lives when we feel God isn’t being good to us, we don’t get what we pray for and so we take matters into our own hands or we just give up on Him rather than choosing to believe what He isn’t giving is actually not good in some way.  We become like even the disciples here, materialists, failing to discern spiritual things.

Paul is fighting the fight with the Judaisers in Galatia.  They have added something to Christ, keeping the law.  Paul says those two things are different from one another, one is for slavery, for hopelessness, and the other, the Gospel, is about freedom.  Hagar was indeed a slave, the servant of Sarah and her child was less than a free born son while Isaac was the child of the wife and therefore free.  Paul went for maximum affront in comparing Jerusalem and the law with Hagar and slavery.  Are the law and Gospel in opposition to one another?  Paul’s answer to that question is a very clear no, the law was the pedagogue leading to the Gospel.  The law revealed my sinfulness to me and my need of a savior, Paul’s cry of “O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death?”  We need the law in order to receive the Gospel as the Good News it is, the Good News in comparison with which nothing else can lay claim to being good.

14 March 2015

Psalm 87, 90; Jer. 13:1-11; Rom. 6:12-23; John 8:47-59

It seems awfully wasteful of God to command Jeremiah to get a new loincloth, wear it briefly and then go put it in the cleft of the rocks along a riverbank in order to ruin it doesn’t it?  The reality is that He is that “foolish” in choosing a people and I don’t just mean Israel, I mean us too.  There was a time when the nation was bound so tightly to Him that it was like a loincloth around His waist, that time was called the Exodus.  The prosperity of the Land separated them from Him, they went astray, forgot their first love, and became no longer able to serve the purpose for which they were intended, to be a royal priesthood and a holy nation.  The Lord takes a people for Himself, causes them to cling tightly to Him and then watches as we become wayward in sin, knowing from the start that we will not be truly faithful to Him.  He loves us so much that He chooses us in spite of knowing we will not always be faithful.  How far do we have to go in waywardness before we return?  Examine your life today and return in those places you need to return.

Can you see Jesus’ face when they ask this question, “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?”  His response could have been, “So you’ve got nothing at all.”  What a ridiculous question and it’s funny that Jesus doesn’t address the issue of being a Samaritan, His origin was in heaven, period, end of sentence and He never engaged otherwise with the “knowledge” of people who thought they knew His earthly origin.  They ask Him here the same basic question the Samaritan woman asked.  They ask if Jesus is greater than their father Abraham while she asked if He were greater than their father, Jacob, Abraham’s grandson who had given them the well where she met Jesus.  In both cases, the answer is yes because Jesus preceded both men and whatever they had to pass along to their descendants came from Him.  Her reaction, and that of her countrymen, was a good bit better than picking up stones to kill Jesus, wasn’t it?

“Present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.” That would be a pretty good way to start the day each day wouldn’t it? If we are not under law but under grace how do we define sin without the law?  The law continues to have a function in our lives and it is to point to sin and righteousness, the opposite of sin.  I can’t know truly what one is without the other, like light and dark.  Now, I can be obedient to the Spirit which will lead me into all righteousness, life not lived in avoiding sin but actively righteous, in ways that Jesus transcended the prohibitions of the law into something higher, righteousness.  The other side of that is that I am not pure in spirit, there is something else inside me that can convince me that things are not unrighteous, not sinful, and yet the Word says something different, and it was given for that reason.  Sanctification, Paul says, is the process of submission to righteousness leading to eternal life.  He means that, at the end of the road is eternal life.  You can’t have justification without sanctification, if you do, the road leads somewhere other than eternal life.

13 March 2015

Psalm 95, 88; Jer. 11:1-8,14-20; Rom. 6:1-11; John 8:33-47

Enjoyment of the covenant blessings by the nation were predicated on obeying the voice of the Lord.  Hearing the words, knowing them, isn’t enough, obedience is demanded.  Hearing and knowing can mean nothing more than making the right sacrifices for sin rather than doing righteousness.  In our context, it can mean praying for forgiveness, presuming on grace rather than living a life in keeping with His sacrifice on our behalf.  Here, the Lord says that they have not obeyed and sacrificial flesh isn’t what He wants.  A consistent theme through the prophets was the idea of obedience.  The first sin was actually not eating the fruit of the tree, the Lord said to Adam, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree

of which I commanded you…”  Whose voice is obeyed is the critical factor.  If you aren’t obeying the voice of the Lord, what voice are you obeying?  Repentance is then demanded, not just confession.

How can Jesus say that they are first, not of Abraham.  His proof is that they do not do the works Abraham did, acts of faith.  Rather, they are acting as those under slavery, the slavery of sin.  They are secondly, not of God and the proof of that is that they do not love Him who does the works of God and makes Him known.  Their rejection of Jesus is tantamount to a rejection of God the Father.  That is a powerful claim, one I would certainly never be comfortable making because I am not perfectly righteous.  Finally, He says that they are the children of the devil, the father of lies.  Can you imagine someone coming into our church or small group and saying that?  Is there any possible way you could react well?  Jesus bases His claim on a sound premise, “Which one of you convicts me of sin?”  If they are unable to convict Him of sin, should they not then listen to His words?  In fact, He is calling them to reconsider their own notions of righteousness and sin, calling them as a prophet to see what God sees.

We have died to sin and been raised to newness of life.  Paul says that is the meaning of baptism.  We are then to live as new creations, not like the old man, living according to the devices and desires of the sin nature but by the new nature, the Spirit.  The proof of belief is found in the new way of life that finds sin repugnant and righteousness attractive.  Have we died?  That is the central question around which all this turns.  Are our desires changed from before we knew Christ?  We should have a new outlook on all things once we have put on Christ, the old things that allured us should have been exposed as unworthy.  Our lives should look different. 

12 March 2015

Psalm 42, 43; Jer. 10:11-24; Rom. 5:12-21; John 8:21-32

Perspective is always important.  “The gods who did not make the heavens and the earth shall perish from the earth and from under the heavens.” That leaves out all but one and puts things into proper perspective doesn’t it?  The “gods” tended to be those who were thought to control aspects of existence, not the creator.  When I first came to western North Carolina I knew several people in the church who were selling their homes and I had someone give the advice to bury a statue of St Joseph in the yard.  It seems that we haven’t progressed past the worship of gods after all.  There are plenty of talismans, good luck charms, and other objects which are thought to control certain aspects of life in our world today.  Perspective is when we remember there is one creator and all the rest is creation.  Then we can pray, “I know, O Lord, that the way of man is not in himself, that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps. Correct me, O Lord, but in justice; not in your anger, lest you bring me to nothing.”  Now we are living in truth.

Jesus is attempting to give those who doubt the proper perspective on Himself.  He comes from above, they are from the world.  There will come a time when you understand He say, “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me.”  There was one at the cross who did see and know, the centurion.  The truth is the Gospel, a righteous man, Jesus, who was and is of one being with the Father, died on a cross as a sacrifice to make atonement for the sins of the whole world and the Father accepted His sacrifice and therefore He was raised again to life on the third day as testimony for all time. 

The idea of original sin is repugnant to some.  Through Adam, sin came into the world.  Didn’t it come through Eve?  Adam’s sin was greater because he had the law directly regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Death came into the world through Adam’s sin but, Paul argues, “death spread to all men because all sinned.”  It is not for Adam’s sin that we are judged, but the propensity for sin is inherited because the world itself is changed by Adam’s sin.  The ground refuses to yield the increase for which it was created and that becomes, at some level, the sin of Cain who gave God some portion of the harvest he worked hard to get.  The gift of righteousness that comes in the second Adam, Jesus, is a gift and the gift of life is greater than the curse of death.  The lifting up of the Son of Man reveals righteousness and sin, our sin against righteousness brought about His death, His righteousness overcame death brought about by sin.  He is therefore, over all, greater than everything.

11 March 2015

Psalm 119:97-120; Jer. 8:18-9:6; Rom. 5:1-11; John 8:12-20

In my life in the church I have met quite a few “prophets.”  Most of the grumpy ones wouldn’t react like Jeremiah to the judgment of God.  Jeremiah identified with God in the situation, the people’s sin made it necessary for the Lord to bring judgment on them.  They wouldn’t listen and they wouldn’t take correction.  Because they are in everlasting covenant with Him, the only option to get their attention is judgment.  Jeremiah also, however, identifies with the people as Moses did, their grief is his grief.  He loves the people to whom he prophesies, he doesn’t take rejection personally.  Prophets have to identify with both God and man in order to be true prophets.  Jesus served as prophet, priest and king.  In His prophetic role, He announced judgment but identified deeply with us, completely, taking on our sin at the cross.  Too often, “prophets” in the church today are angry with the church and see themselves as innocent victims who simply share what the Lord has given them and then look upon suffering in the church not with pity or love but a sense of superiority, or they take the role of Jonah, despising God’s mercy on the people they hate.  True prophets are hard to find, that’s the reason there haven’t been many of them.

The light of the world is the Torah.  It is the first light that was created when God said, “Let there be light.”  That light wasn’t the sun, moon and stars, those came later.  That light made it possible to see from one end of the earth to the other and it was lost in the sin of Adam, so say the sages.  The Jews taught that those who followed Torah, who lived in obedience, restored that light to the world, it defined righteousness and therefore righteousness, light, was overcoming darkness when someone did a righteous act in accord with the Law.  That is why David wrote, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”  (Psalm 119.105)  When Jesus claims to be the light of the world, He is claiming for Himself that He is the incarnation of the Word of God, perfect righteousness.  Can you imagine someone claiming that?  It is easy to see why the leaders are offended by Him but such a claim bids you to measure it as true or not.  They are unwilling to even think about such an idea as investigating the claim, it is rejected out of hand. 

Paul tells the depth of Jesus’ love for us in that while we were yet sinners and enemies of God He came and died for us.  He came to expose the darkness by contrast to His light and instead of streaming to the light, we preferred the darkness and did our best to overcome and extinguish the light by putting Him on a cross, not knowing that such was the plan of redemption.  Through the Holy Spirit we are light-bearers today (at least we are supposed to be) and we should, like Paul, rejoice in our sufferings because they are intended to make us like Him who suffered and died.  Our attitude towards our enemies is to be like His, love and willingness to suffer for them.  Sometimes that is the way people see the light, how we suffer and endure.  Think of the Roman centurion who had likely been part of the group gambling for Jesus’ clothes and perhaps involved in His torment, looking up at the man on the cross and saying, “Truly this was the Son of God!”

10 March 2015

Psalm 78:1-39; Jer. 7:21-34; Rom. 4:13-25; John 7:37-52

Religion is not a substitute for relationship.  The people of Jeremiah’s day were more interested in the practice of religion, the offering of sacrifices for sin, than they were in obedience.  They were financially affluent and could, therefore, afford the price of sin.  The Lord reminds them that the original idea was obedience to His voice, the sacrificial system was not instituted to deal with deliberate sinful behavior but for sin that was not premeditated.  The notion of sin is cheapened when it becomes a calculation of what I get away with.  The danger of the cross as the answer is that it can become a means of cheap grace which is no grace at all.  Our obedience reveals that we agree with Him on what constitutes evil.  If we persist in sinning, we are saying that evil is something else and that, therefore, holiness is an insignificant concept, and then, that the cross is empty of meaning and significance.  Judgment will fall on such a nation.

The last day of the feast is a day for faith.  It comes at what should be the end of the dry season and water is poured out as a sign of faith that the Lord will provide new water in the rain He has promised.  Jesus stands in the midst of this ceremony and offers that if they will come to Him, rivers of living water will issue from their hearts.  The question He is asking is, is this real faith or only religious ceremony.  As per usual, the debate devolves to a question of origins, Nazareth and Galilee aren’t where the Messiah comes from.  They are not paying attention to the signs He is giving because of what they think they know. Nicodemus challenges the prevailing “wisdom” of the leaders and for his trouble gets nothing more than a sarcastic insult.  At least he tried.

Religion is doing the right things in order to obtain rewards.  The reward of life, however, is only for those who, like Abraham, have faith.  Abraham believed God and it was counted to him as righteousness, he didn’t do anything except believe and he and Sarah had a son based on his faith.  He received all the rest, nations coming from him, his children inheriting the land, and the resulting nation being the covenant chosen people of God, because of faith.  When we substitute confidence in our own performance for the finished work of Jesus we practice religion and it is meaningless.  When we glory in the cross and the One who died there to make atonement for our sins, we practice faith and receive the reward of the faithful.  We also are true worshippers when we glory in Him and practice obedience.

9 March 2015

Psalm 80; Jer. 7:1-15; Rom. 4:1-12; John 7:14-36

The words, “This is the temple of the Lord”, were deceptive because they promoted an idea that so long as the temple was there, all was right with God.  A false sense of security is a dangerous thing.  We could, perhaps, substitute the words, “You have been baptized” to get the same idea.  The existence of the temple wasn’t intended to only give comfort, it was also a witness against sin.  What is called for in the prophecy here is amendment of life, truly executing justice among one another, no oppression of the sojourner (foreigner) among them, orphans and widows, and not going after other gods, then the temple would be again the temple of the living God who would live among them.  If not, the implication was clear, He would not be there and the temple would mean nothing at all, simply a building.  In order that they believe Him on these matters, the Lord points to the former place of worship, Shiloh, and says they should go there and see what has become of it, if they can find anything at all.  No Jew could imagine the desecration of the temple, Gentiles going into the holy of holies, but if the Lord is not there it is not holy at all, just another interior room in a building.

The man everyone had been looking for and wondering about early in the feast now appears in the middle of it, teaching in the temple, for all to see and hear.  God was, in the form of Jesus, teaching His people in His temple and some question where He got such learning seeing that He never studied.  A rabbi pointed to his teacher, his rabbi, for his authority and here Jesus points to the Father as His rabbi and says, the measure is not where I studied but truth.  He is a challenge to the authorities who rule the temple. His words are enigmatic.  They believe they know where He is from, Nazareth, the son of Mary and Joseph, so He cannot be Messiah and Jesus makes no effort to make clear that they have it wrong, speaking instead of having been sent, but they must decide who it was that sent Him.  It is all very confusing that he will only be with them a little while and then return to the one who sent Him but they can’t go there.  They focus on the wrong question though. If they answer the question of “who?” they will then begin to sort out the rest.

Justification is an important issue.  We are justified, accounted righteous, by faith.  That is the end of the story as far as justification is concerned.  Our faith is in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ the righteous One, and in that faith His righteousness is credited to our account for life.  Works do not justify us.  We cannot stand before the judgment seat and plead our works because there are other works, works of sin, that plead an alternate case.  Paul says that circumcision is a work, it is a work of obedience to the command.  Abraham was counted as righteous before the command, so it is faith which justifies.  That being said, faith is shown in works.  Abraham is the father of those “who also walk in the footsteps of the faith that our father Abraham had before he was circumcised.”  In Jeremiah’s day, faith was in the temple in their midst and for this faith they were condemned, for it was faith without works.

8 March 2015

Psalm 93, 96; Jer. 6:9-15; 1 Cor. 6:12-20; Mark 5:1-20

The wrath of God is such that nothing will be left, no gleanings, no grapes the harvester forgot, nothing.  He commands, “Pour it out upon the children in the street, and upon the gatherings of young men, also; both husband and wife shall be taken, the elderly and the very aged.”  Does it seem horrible that this should happen to the children in the street, the elderly and the very aged?  No one can lay claim to righteousness, not even these, all are corrupt, like in the days of Noah.  The prophets and priests are as corrupt as all the rest, proclaiming “Peace, peace” when there is no peace.  There is always a temptation to heal the wounds of people lightly by rushing to proclaim peace when everything hasn’t been dealt with and no real peace exists.  Peace between God and man was established by dealing honestly with sin in the sacrificial system.  When we gloss over sin, between us and God or in our interpersonal relationships, we won’t get to peace, only détente and that is choosing only to postpone the inevitable rather than averting it.

This entire scene is strange to say the least.  Jesus is in a Gentile land, in the tombs, with a demon-possessed man.  The man cannot be subdued yet when he sees Jesus he comes and bows before Him, begging Jesus not to torment him.  Apparently, both the man and the demons recognized Jesus not only as the Son of the Most High God but that His power was greater than that which they possessed.  The spirit, identified as Legion, begs Jesus not to send them from this country, which tells us that it found a happy home there among these Gentiles, in a place where the Jews thought the gates of hell to be.  The spirits bargain with Jesus to cast them into a herd of pigs which they then drive over a cliff into the sea, two thousand pigs!  The people of the town then come and beg Jesus to leave after they see what He has done, His power at work.  They choose to have the power of darkness over His power.  The man, however, is not allowed to accompany Jesus, he remains there as a witness.  They can’t just conveniently forget what has happened this day.

Paul is very clear that sexual immorality is a serious sin.  Everything else, he says, is sin “outside the body” while sexual immorality is a sin against the body itself.  The body matters, we are not dualists who believe that the body is an accident while the soul is eternal.  Yes, this body will ultimately be exchanged for a heavenly and glorified one, this one is a body of death.  That does not mean, however, that these bodies lack significance, the incarnation of Jesus, taking on this flesh, tells us otherwise.  Sexual sin is the uniting of our bodies in a way the Lord has not ordained.  Marriage is ordained by Him for a purpose and when we unite ourselves with another who is not our spouse, we violate both bodies and the covenant we have with Him.  Marriage is the submission of this covenant relationship with one another to the prior covenant with Him.  It does not break our unity with Him but this “one flesh” issue matters deeply.  How do we deal with this sin in our lives in such a way as to reconcile with God, restoring that essential unity?

7 March 2015

Psalm 75, 76; Jer. 5:20-31; Rom. 3:19-31; John 7:1-13

“Do you not fear me?”  Is that still appropriate since the resurrection?  We sometimes act as though fear no longer has a place in our relationship with the Lord since Jesus came to make known the love of the Father.  He hasn’t changed and in His grandeur remains something and someone to fear.  I loved my dad when I was a kid but I also feared him in the sense of breaking a rule would bring a certain amount of anger down and my life would change in one way or another because of that.  In the Chronicles of Narnia the fear of Aslan is never gone, he isn’t safe but he’s good.  The fear of the Lord is part of the check on our behavior.  Our acts will be judged and it is up to us whether those will be found pleasing or burned up like so much stubble.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom in the sense that we begin to understand that our lives are like what Jeremiah says of the sea, within boundaries set by Him.

The reason Jesus didn’t go about in Judea is that the Jews were looking to kill Him.  Does that mean He feared the Jews?  No, it means that His time had not yet come.  Initially, He tells His brothers exactly that as a reason for not going up to the feast.  Then, as with the wedding at Cana in Galilee, Jesus does go to the feast, to eavesdrop as it were.  What He hears is confusion.  Some believe He is a good man and some believe He is a deceiver but no one spoke openly of Him for fear of the Jews.  Fear of man is a very real thing and it is based in what we see and know.  Do we think of God as less real because He is less tangible?  It is easy to get lulled into a place where we only think of God as forgiving and forget that He also judges.

Paul’s argument is that the purpose of the Law given to the Jews is that they not be too proud of being His chosen people.  The Law serves to show that even though they are chosen, they are also as guilty as Gentiles of sin.  Justification, he says was never about righteousness in keeping perfectly the Law, no one ever did such a thing until Jesus came.  Justification has always been about faith, faith in the efficacy of the sacrificial system to receive forgiveness and, ultimately faith in Jesus’ sacrifice as the once and for all propitiation, reversing God’s judgment and restoring God’s favor, for sin, of which all are guilty.  As there is no temple in Jerusalem, the only way anyone, Jew and Gentile alike, can know for certain they are in right relationship with God is in Jesus, and that certainty comes from the resurrection, the proof that God accepted His sacrifice on the cross.  Perfect love indeed casts out fear, we need not fear judgment to eternal damnation but we still need to fear His anger against sin in our lives.

6 March 2015

Psalm 69; Jer. 5:1-9; Rom. 2:25-3:18; John 5:30-47

When Abraham bargained with God over Sodom the final deal was that if he could find ten righteous men in Sodom the Lord would not destroy the city.  Here, the Lord says to Jeremiah, “Search her squares to see if you can find a man, one who does justice and seeks truth, that I may pardon her.”  One man, not ten, one.  Jeremiah first observed the poor but gave them a pass because they didn’t know better, they weren’t well educated, so he looked to the wealthy, those who were educated in the law but found nothing better in them.  A prophet must see what God sees, must side completely with God in the truth.  He or she must, however, side with the people in seeking mercy.  This was the lesson Moses learned in his ministry of leadership, he was the representative of God to the people and of the people to God. Truth and mercy were both necessary to do the job.  The Lord asks a simple question that we all need to answer, “How can I pardon you?”  We don’t deserve pardon unless we repent and then only because of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. 

Jesus stands before the religious leaders and makes a defense He should never have had to make.  He is the perfect righteousness of God, the only righteous man who has ever lived, and they ask Him to make His case for what He is doing in healing a man who was lame for 38 years.  He says there are multiple witnesses who attest to Him, the Father who sent Him, John the Baptist, the works He is doing, and the Scriptures, the writings of Moses.  They search the Scriptures and still miss the truth.  They, like the wealthy of Jeremiah’s day, have all the information they need to know righteousness as it stands before them and they aren’t seeing that truth.  We wouldn’t either except for that other witness, the witness of the Holy Spirit. Today is a wonderful day to thank the Lord for giving you that witness that you might have life.

Could we take the word circumcision from the first part of the lesson and replace it with baptism?  I think we could do that and the argument would be valid.  Are all those who are baptized saved?  Do they not still have responsibility for being a disciple?  We, the church, bear a large measure of responsibility to those we baptize, that is why Paul says he’s glad he didn’t have a ministry of baptism in Corinth.  We can’t baptize without discipleship and what do we do when those we baptize stop going to church, remove themselves from the body?  Don’t we have some obligation to warn them what they are doing?  Paul’s words bring us back to the question God asked in Jeremiah, “How can I pardon you?” The question bespeaks God’s desire to pardon and we know that the answer for one and all, since none is righteous, is Jesus.

5 March 2015

Psalm 71; Jer. 4:9-10,19-28; Rom. 2:12-24; John 5:19-29

The day of reckoning will come in spite of the denials of the kings, officials, priests and prophets.  That day will come indeed for Jerusalem and the nation and the reaction among the leaders is that they will be appalled and astounded.  The devastation in the land is such that it seems that the earth has returned to its primordial state, the earth formless and void, no light in the heavens, the mountains and hills not settled in their places, no man to be found, the fruitful land now a desert.  We live in a time when judgment and reckoning are defined out of the picture.  Surely a loving God would not judge in this way but the Bible should keep us from such ideas.  God judges sin and no sin is more decisively and harshly judged than apostasy.  His people have a job, to be a holy nation, a kingdom of priests, making Him known, and when they fail, judgment comes.  Repentance and revival both begin the same place, in the assembly of the redeemed.

The picture Jesus is painting here is that He is an ambassador of God and to reject Him is to reject the one who sent Him.  It is similar to the parable He tells right at the end in Jerusalem concerning the wicked tenants of the vineyard who reject those sent to collect the rent due the owner and then, when the son comes, the tenants kill him.  Jesus says that the Son only does what the Father shows Himself to be doing and so the Son makes the Father known in the works He does.  Jesus promises that there is more to come, even more amazing things, like raising the dead to life, which He points to as the penultimate sign and we will see the Son do that very thing at the tomb of Lazarus.  Final confirmation of Jesus as Son is at Easter.  Here, He also says that judgment has been committed to the Son and those who believe are the ones who will be found innocent.  Does belief mean more than assent?  Does it not entail life lived in keeping with that belief?  It always has, always will.

Paul says all will be judged and that judgment will be based in one simple thing, faithfulness to what you know.  “It is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.”  Gentiles are responsible for the knowledge they have of God based on the witness of creation.  Denying creation by positing some other means of the appearance of the universe is no excuse.  Yes, faith was counted to Abraham as righteousness but clearly that faith was active not simply passive. Paul says that if you don’t have the Law, i.e. you don’t know the specific will of God in all things, the evidence of creation and your conscience, the remnant of creation in the image of God, both guide you.  Paul’s attention, however, is diverted to the Jews who have the Law but don’t keep it.  This is the same message Jesus preached, “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses' seat, so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice.”  The problem is that because of their failure to do anything but give lip service to the law is the Name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles.  How does the world feel about the church?  Some of that is down to rejection of the truth but some is due to our failure to make Him truly known.