This passage is a reflection on the Exodus. The mixture of fire and hail is one of those
things that consumes the attention of the rabbis. How can these two exist
together in any way without one doing away with the other? Yet, during the plagues they indeed were
mingled in judgment against the Egyptians.
That is a true miracle and the rabbis know it and marvel at how can such
things be. It should also have gotten
the attention of the Egyptians at the time but their hearts were so hardened
that they couldn’t see what was right before their eyes, the God of creation
doing something impossible. We see the
same hardness of heart in the Revelation when God is destroying His good
creation to get the attention of the people created in His image who refuse to
see. Science can be manipulated to
explain it all if your commitment is to scientism. The other thing about which the author marvels
in longing is the manna, it tastes like whatever you want it to be and yet is
so perishable that it melts with the first warmth of the day. That reality, the author says, should get you
up early to praise the Lord before even the dawn.
Faith on display. The
crowds have no idea what Jesus has done across the sea in the land of the Gerasenes
yet they await his return with eagerness.
Luke tells us they were waiting for him and yet he doesn’t tell us why. We
know of two whose reasons were plain, the woman with the issue of blood and
Jairus. The woman had been suffering
chronically with her condition for twelve years and had spent “all her living”
on doctors trying to be cured. She had
nothing left but this one hope, that Jesus, the man about whom she had heard
much, would be able to do something and so she took a chance, she pressed in
and touched the hem of his garment, breaking every convention and rule for
women in such condition. Her risk of
discovery was great. If she touched
Jesus He would be ritually unclean as would anyone He touched, He wouldn’t be
fit to enter Jairus’ house, the leader of the synagogue, whose daughter was
sick and possibly dying. She received
faith’s reward and then Jesus asked who touched Him and she came trembling and
fell before Him in fear and heard Him praise her for her faith. Jairus’ faith was such that impurity no
longer mattered, only his daughter and his hope was in this Jesus and his faith
also was rewarded.
If my brother has a strongly held belief that something is
sin and I feel that I have the freedom in Christ to partake or participate and
there is no law against it, what is my duty?
Paul says that my duty is to love the other, weaker brother by
abstaining from such things. When I am
with someone who is a recovering alcoholic I make it a practice not to partake
of alcohol. Does that make me a
hypocrite? No, it means I love my
brother for whom alcohol could be a great temptation and a stumbling
block. Does that mean this should control
all my life? No, not necessarily, if the
Word does not conclusively condemn something my brother has no right to make it
a law in my life and curtail the freedom I have in Christ. We have a duty to our brothers and sisters
but that duty does not allow them to circumscribe our freedom in all
things. Faith is always the key, it is
our guide to things clean and unclean about which Scripture is silent.
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