Jesse certainly doesn’t seem impressed by his son David, the
king, does he? He sends David with
provisions for his brothers, the soldiers and asks for some word concerning
them. This scene reminds me of Genesis
37 when Jacob sends Joseph, the man whose dreams prophesied he would be lord
over his brothers, to see how they are as they tend flocks. David’s brothers receive him as Joseph’s
brothers received him, which is to say, with disdain. The army is so afraid of this man, Goliath,
that it cowers and refuses to come out.
David sees the truth, this man speaks not in taunting Israel’s army, they
are not Saul’s men, they belong to the Lord, “who is this uncircumcised
Philistine, that he should defy the armies of the living God?” We forget that we are the people of the
living God and we lose heart, cowering before our enemies. We need to know two things better and believe
them, the Bible and church history. The
church has persevered in spite of overwhelming odds and great enemies. We have nothing to fear.
John, the man who was prophesied by an archangel to be the
forerunner of Messiah, doesn’t look much like the man you would expect to hold
that job. He is separated from the world
by dress and diet. Does that make him a
madman or a saint? John’s life was a statement
about worldliness and corruption and his call was for a people to come out of
the way of life to which they had become accustomed and prepare themselves in
holiness and righteousness for the coming of the kingdom of God and the
Messiah. After Jesus’ baptism the first
thing that happened to the man who would be king is that the Spirit immediately
(because it is Mark everything happened at once or immediately) drove Him into
the wilderness to be tempted by satan. He
is also among the wild beasts, a place where fear or faith can flourish. In our day we would expect that he immediately
won the lottery or something, not that he would actually be separated from
comfort and safety.
Peter’s initial words are truly gracious for a man who has
been taught to think all of his life in racial and ethnic terms, to think God
loves Peter, his family and his nation to the exclusion of all others. “Truly I understand that God shows no
partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is
acceptable to him”, is an amazing statement for a Jew to have made in that
time. At the same time, he could never
have expected how completely true that statement was to prove even as he was
speaking to these Gentiles. The outpouring
of the Spirit on these people, as evidenced by their speaking in tongues, was
the first time the issue of circumcision and baptism were to be a crisis of
some sort. Cornelius and his family
weren’t circumcised but Peter, realizing God had already done the work of
giving the Spirit, decides the least he can do is baptize them. I wonder if, after he left this place, he
began to have second thoughts about what he had done. The movement of the kingdom was incrementally
going outward from the Samaritans, a tribe separated from the nation long
before, to the Ethiopian eunuch who was also a seeker but who couldn’t be circumcised,
to this God-fearer, a true Gentile, one who didn’t know anything about Yahweh,
had to be the next step.
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