26 March 2011

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

The Lord is lord of all creation, He rules over creation and it obeys His will, as it always has done. The only problem in creation is us, those who were created in His image, given the ability to reason but also the ability to interact directly with our creator. We were perhaps given something we are incapable of handling, an ability to choose autonomy. The thing that sets us apart in all creation is the thing that sets us apart in all creation. We were given the ability to choose to obey and we chose to disobey and now we have no way to put the genie back into the bottle. We need a savior, we cannot restore ourselves to God and we cannot obey unless we receive the Holy Spirit that wills to obey and to live the life God has for us. These people are His chosen ones and yet they are choosing now and not choosing the one who loved them, delivered them from slavery, gave them His Word, promises them forgiveness and love.

Why does Jesus go up to the feast after He has told His brothers that He wasn’t going? This scene is similar to John 2 when Mary encourages Jesus to do something about the shortage of wine at the wedding feast in Cana. Jesus does not move at the impulse and direction of anyone other than the Father. The brothers here suggest a motives for going that has nothing to do with God’s agenda, that His disciples may see the works He is doing and that He would seek fame. The works Jesus did were purposeful, they pointed to the Father whom He represented, and they were not for His own fame. He was not simply a miracle-worker, He was a savior and not only did each work point to its source, it moved towards something. For whatever reason we skipped chapter 6 in John where Jesus feeds the multitude one day and the next they too press Him to do their bidding. When He refuses and speaks of eating His flesh and drinking His blood they reject Him. He is not here licking His wounds from that day, He is obedient to the will of the Father. Sometimes we have to get away and stop listening to others in order to know what the Father would have us do.

The Gospel in clear and unambiguous terms, all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and therefore need a savior, Jesus lived a sinless, righteous life and His death is the atonement for the sins of the whole world. If we believe He was a righteous man and that perfect righteousness is the only acceptable sacrifice to God and we have faith that the Father accepted that sacrifice on our behalf then we will receive forgiveness of sins and life everlasting. It is all about His righteousness, God’s acceptance of Him, and our faith in Him, nothing more, nothing less.

When He shall come with trumpet sound,
Oh may I then in Him be found.
Dressed in His righteousness alone,
Faultless to stand before the throne.

On Christ the solid Rock I stand,
All other ground is sinking sand;
All other ground is sinking sand.

25 March 2011

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

Though the prophet calls the city/nation to repent, and the Lord has brought calamity on them, they will not repent. In I Kings 8 we hear Solomon’s prayer for such times as this, when the nation has turned away from the Lord and He has punished them, when they turn again to Him that He will hear and will relent and bless them again. The Lord has promised that He will forgive and will restore the covenant blessings and yet they will not give up their apostasy. The prophet begins with the belief that it is only those who do not know the truth who refuse to turn back to the Lord so he goes to the great, those who know the truth, and they too refuse to repent. The nation has completely forsaken the Lord and gone after other gods, those who are not gods, those who promise to satisfy their lustful desires.

Jesus has His first serious confrontation with the leaders in Jerusalem. His accusation against them is that they who believe themselves to be righteous followers of Yahweh are actually so blinded that they are unable to see Him standing before them. Their problem with Him here is that He has healed a blind man on the Sabbath and told the man to take up his mat and walk. They have surely seen this man these many years and therefore there is no excuse for not giving glory. There has been no set-up, no false healing. Jesus points to John as His witness as well as the works He is doing and says they refuse to believe the testimony and they refuse to believe the testimony of Scripture because He isn’t truly what they want. It is a common problem.

What exactly is Paul arguing here? First he says that there is advantage in being a Jew and value in circumcision and then he says that Jews are no better off than Greeks. Which is it? It depends. In that the Jews have the favor and promise of God and were given the law directly by the Lord, there is advantage yet all have sinned, with and without the law being given or known. The law does not benefit us if we don’t keep it, but our unfaithfulness in keeping the law does not nullify God’s faithfulness in forgiving iniquity. The promises of the law include God’s forgiveness, it is part of his character revealed to Moses on the mountain in Exodus 34. If it weren’t His character we would have no hope and the law tells us that God has always provided for our unrighteousness with respect to the law. What keeps us from repentance?

Make his deeds known among the peoples;
see that they remember that his Name is exalted.

Sing the praises of the Lord, for he has done great things,
and this is known in all the world.

Cry aloud, inhabitants of Zion, ring out your joy,
for the great one in the midst of you is the Holy One of Israel.

24 March 2011

Psalm 70, 71; Jer. 4:9-10,19-28; Rom. 2:12-24; John 5:19-29

What Jeremiah “sees” in the prophetic sense is startling and sickening to him. First he reacts as though the Lord has deceived the people by promising it will be well with them when in fact He intends destruction but that is not the promise initially. The promise is that first He will allow them to be overrun by their enemies and then He will restore them. The destruction that Jeremiah sees is complete and yet his focus is not entirely on the destruction but on the people and what he sees is a people who have no idea what to do or where to go because they have forsaken their source of wisdom and understanding. The Lord brings the land to the point of ruin but not quite and He will not relent until the devastation is complete.

Jesus makes extraordinary claims here that would certainly have shocked his hearers. “Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.” He is either speaking of Joseph, in which case the statement is silly and meaningless, or He is speaking of the Father in heaven, in which case the statement is blasphemous to the Jews. To lay claim to equality with God is to set oneself up for crucifixion. Today we would have someone locked away for such a claim but in Judaism the punishment would have been exactly what happened. He also says that as the Father has life in Himself so the Son does as well. God is the giver of life, alone in this capacity, all Jews would have known this truth. How can this man, who just recently burst on the scene and whose history is known to at least some of them (remember Jesus is in Galilee here) claim to have life in Himself? There was a time when He was not. John 1.1 provides us with the backstory but they don’t have that benefit. How could anyone hear this and believe it? Jesus was gaining a crowd through the healing of this child and now He goes and spoils it with these claims. He never makes it easy.

Is Paul arguing that something more than faith is required? He says that doing the law is righteousness. Doing is important, even those of us who have been freed from the penalty of the law. Our lives are to be lived according to God’s will and He made that will plain in the law given to Moses at Sinai. There are some aspects of the law that are no longer, such as the dietary restrictions that were done away with in Acts 10 in Peter’s vision. The moral aspects of the law continue to be in force and the two great commandments of loving God with all that we are and loving our neighbor as ourselves are to guide our conduct. If we believe in Jesus, have the faith necessary to receive the gift of life, we also receive the Holy Spirit who guides us to keep God’s law that is written on our hearts. If our lives are characterized by sinfulness and we do not see transformation, can we say we truly believe?

Surely, it is God who saves me;
I will trust in him and not be afraid.

For the Lord is my stronghold and my sure defense,
and he will be my Savior.

Therefore you shall draw water with rejoicing
from the springs of salvation.

And on that day you shall say,
Give thanks to the Lord and call upon his Name;

23 March 2011

Psalm 72; Jer. 3:6-18; Rom. 1:26-2:11; John 5:1-18

The Lord accuses both Israel and Judah of apostasy and, surprisingly, finds Israel more righteous than Judah in spite of the fact that Israel is continuing to chase after other gods. His accusation against Judah is that they have returned to Him only in pretense, they have taken His Name as vanity. The accusation could be that they have forsaken relationship in favor of religion, they are treating the practice of the faith as magic to entice Him to do their bidding by virtue of their outward observance of His commands. Is that attitude present in western Christianity today? In His accusation here there is still the promise of blessing if they will return to Him, but it will not be all who participate in this blessing, the Lord will choose from among them those who will rebuild the nation.

Jesus does an incredible sign, healing a man who had been paralyzed for 38 years. He had been lying by this pool all that time and in that time had never had a single person there to help him into the pool when it was disturbed and therefore healing was possible. Now is the time for healing, the healer has come. Why does Jesus ask him the question if he wants to be healed? Would he even be in this place if he didn’t? The religious leaders who now use this occasion to question Jesus’ religious bona fides have surely passed this man numerous times and have seen him there for these many years and yet they now see him well, carrying his mat (a no-no on the Sabbath) and they do not give glory to God and come to Jesus, but question Him as a law-breaker. Their religion is a pretense, not done in order to see God but to be respected and admired for their righteousness.

So are we judged by faith or by works? The answer is “yes.” Works reveal faith. Obedience to God’s commands is evidence of faith. In the Great Commission, Jesus tells us to teach disciples to obey everything He commanded. If we don’t have evidence of the Spirit working in a person, real transformation of life and thought, how could we say that they truly believe? I accepted that money makes the world go round and that it is important to life a long time ago and therefore I now insist that it be paid to me on a regular basis for my work. Paul says that God expects us to recognize that believing, having faith in him, will have measurable effects on our lives. We should think and live differently if we believe in the God of the Bible and in the end it is easier to measure our faith by the witness of our lives.

( A little rant is in order today. The Episcopal Lectionary skips verses 26 and 27 of the 1^st chapter of Romans that have to do with sexual immorality related to homosexuality. When you go day by day in the lectionary it is not so easy to see, we are still in chapter 1 so yesterday’s lesson was whatever it was and today’s seems to be a continuation but it isn’t. We skip about in Jeremiah a bit but why here in the Epistle? Why should we have skipped these two verses? Clearly an agenda is at work to avoid the teaching on sexuality so that we become indifferent to such things. It is an inexcusable breach of faith to have partitioned the readings in this way. Those who trust the church to guide them through Scripture have been betrayed by their leaders when they do things like this.)

Behold Him there the risen Lamb,
My perfect spotless righteousness,
The great unchangeable I AM,
The King of glory and of grace,
One in Himself I cannot die.
My soul is purchased by His blood,
My life is hid with Christ on high,
With Christ my Savior and my God!

22 March 2011

Psalm 61, 62; Jer. 2:1-13; Rom. 1:16-25; John 4:43-54

The Lord presents his case through Jeremiah concerning Israel. They have forsaken Him, the fountain of living waters and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. It wasn’t enough that they forsook the one who loved them, brought them out of Egypt, and gave them this land, they also chased after other gods who are no gods at all. The Lord encourages them to search among other nations to see if there is any precedent for their unfaithfulness. The other nations at least remain steadfast in their devotion to these false gods even though they are nothing at all. His people, though, after all He has done on their behalf, have left Him and gone after other gods. We absolutely have a problem with faithfulness.

Seeing isn’t always believing but sometimes believing leads to seeing. Here, Jesus seems to question the official’s faith as being based in signs and wonders. The official isn’t interested in debating, his faith is clear, "Sir, come down before my child dies." His faith in Jesus is already strong and Jesus sends him away with the promise that the child will live. The man takes Jesus at His word and is rewarded for that faith. Do we take Jesus at His word? He made many promises to those who believe that have to do with greater things than these will we do and also that we will experience persecution and yet there are those who do not believe that the promise of greater things continues to us and that a commitment to Him means we will experience worldly blessing and prosperity. The life of a Christian is to be characterized by a faith such as this official’s, walking in faith in the promises of Christ and trusting in Him for all things. We have a benefit this man did not, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, by which to walk.

Paul’s claim here is that creation testifies to God. In the past hundred plus years we have seen a movement to deny that “God” had anything to do with creation as we know it. In some ways creation created itself. That would leave us without a purpose to human life other than the will to be, but where did that will to be come from and how can it be explained in terms of the reality that eventually it will no longer be at all? Religion, then, is nothing more than a wish dream that extends the will to be into a spiritual existence beyond the grave. Paul says that when we exchange the truth of God for a lie and begin to worship creation, mother earth, Gaia, any of the earth religions, or even materialism, the desire to accumulate and control the things of earth, we are led into all manner of sin and degradation of our nobility as creation in the image of God. Faith is believing in a good creator of all things who intentionally created us in His image.

When Satan tempts me to despair
And tells me of the guilt within,
Upward I look and see Him there
Who made an end of all my sin.
Because the sinless Savior died
My sinful soul is counted free.
For God the just is satisfied
To look on Him and pardon me.