Moses needing to remind the people of all God has done for
them seems sort of like those little packets of silica gel that are in
everything we buy nowadays that have the warning not to eat it. It is necessary
to say that? The American Association of
Poison Control Centers reports that about 38,000 people a year, most of whom
are under six years of age, eat that stuff.
God’s people need constantly to be reminded of all He has done for them
as well. This group either saw for
themselves and remember the events of the exodus from Egypt, the crossing of the
Red Sea and the giving of the Law at Sinai and yet they can forget His
greatness and His choosing them to be His people by all these acts. We can easily forget such things in either
hard times or prosperity. We need to
remind ourselves regularly of all He has done and is doing for us lest we
forget. (By the way, silica gel isn’t
particularly toxic, even if you ingested a relatively large quantity of it the
worst that would happen is some nausea and vomiting. I looked it up, didn’t test it.)
This is, without doubt, the most difficult of all Jesus’
parables. Is He commending the
steward? The wealthy man is always used
as God in the parables so the wealthy man has to be the good guy in the story. The steward is going to be fired and the
reason is that “charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his
possessions.” When he goes to the
clients first, he marks down the bills in order to ingratiate himself with
these debtors. He still has, technically,
the authority to do this because he has the books. The clients would certainly have been
impressed with the forgiving nature of the man but they would also have soon
known that the manager was fired that day.
Their appreciation would be towards the manager when the owner didn’t
re-instate the amounts owed and they would have owed the manager a favor. Jesus doesn’t commend this deceit, only notes
that the worldly know how to use things to their own advantage. Making friends “by means of unrighteous
wealth” is an awkward translation of a Syrian term “mammon of unrighteousness.” To do this that “when it fails they may
receive you into the eternal dwellings” would indicate that we are to use our
wealth to help the poor, to help our neighbors who have need, that we might
show we are not attached to wealth and thereby be received into the heavenly
dwellings.
What the people of Moses’ time could not gaze upon, the
fading of the glory of God as Moses spent time apart from Him in doing the work
of leading the people, is of no real comparison with what we see in gazing at the
face of Jesus. The miracles, beginning with
a virgin birth, continuing through things like the blind receiving sight, the
deaf hearing, demons driven out, lepers cleansed, the dead raised, and
ultimately Jesus’ resurrection from the dead rise to a higher level than even
what the Jews saw in Egypt and at the Red Sea, Sinai, and in the
wilderness. We are witnesses to
something greater and yet we doubt and question when life is hard or we don’t
think of Him at all when it’s all good in our world.
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