Sabbath

In Exodus 31, God gives Moses some commands about the Sabbath. He's already included keeping the Sabbath in the Ten Commandments, but there's some additional guidance here. God emphasises the importance of the Sabbath (breaking it is a capital offence), and repeats the injunction against doing any work on that day. But he also twice refers to it as a sign. A sign points to something; what does the Sabbath point to?

Whoever saves his life will lose it

In Mark 8 Jesus says that whoever wants save their life will lose it. Like many of Jesus' sayings, this seems counter-intuitive. Surely saving a life is a good thing? Don't we congratulate and celebrate those who save lives, whether they are surgeons, firefighters or quick-thinking passers-by? Surely saving your own life isn't different from saving someone else's? Is it bad to save your own life?

This isn't what Jesus is talking about. He's not talking about rescuing yourself (or anyone else) from a burning building. This is part of Jesus' teaching about what it means to be a disciple. He says that anyone who follows him must take up their cross. There is only one outcome for the person who takes up their cross: they will die. There isn't an option of taking up your cross on a part-time basis, or doing a bit of occasional leisurely cross-carrying. Taking up your cross is a full-time, and final, commitment. It's in this context that Jesus talks about people who want to save their lives. But what does he mean when he says that those who want to save their life will lose it?

No peace for the wicked

The phrase "no peace for the wicked" is one that has passed into common use. It occurs twice in Isaiah, in chapter 48 and in chapter 57, and is part of the explanation of why things have gone so wrong for God's people. In chapter 48, God tells the people that if only they had kept His commands, peace and well-being would have flowed like a river, as unending as the waves of the sea; in chapter 57 God promises to bring peace and healing to people far and near. Chapter 57 includes descriptions of the kind of things that wicked people are doing. They are described as tiring themselves out, rushing from one useless idol to another and from one sexual partner to the next, unwilling to admit that none of these things are actually helping.

Although there is less child sacrifice nowadays, the search for a goal, an aim, a sexual partner, an idol that satisfies is still a feature of modern life. Should we condemn the world as wicked? Certainly there is wickedness. But this description of life from Isaiah's time is also useful as an explanation of why it's so difficult for people in the world today to find peace.

God is not angry

What is God like? One of the criticisms that non-Christians aim at the Bible is that God is vengeful, capricious and angry. They ask why they would want to believe in such a God, let alone worship or obey him? And parts of the Old Testament, taken by themselves, certainly make it appear that God is like that. There's a lot of anger and destruction; it's easy to see where a caricature of God as forever smiting people has come from.

God is a person, not an impersonal force. He has feelings, and He responds to what we do, just as a friend might be upset or angry with us - while not stopping being our friend. In the first books of the Bible, God does get angry. But there is an important promise in Isaiah 54, when God says that He's not going to be angry any more.

Eat and drink for tomorrow we die

A while ago I was watching a programme on TV about money and spending, and there was a woman interviewed who justified the large amount that she spent on designer clothes, phones, tablets, etc., by saying "I could be dead tomorrow." The phrase "Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die" is in Isaiah 22, and is followed by God saying that this sin will never be atoned for. Does this mean that God doesn't want us to have fun? Is God anti-party? Should we be sober, sensible and just a little bit sad?

What do you do when you're healed?

All three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) have a brief story - a couple of sentences - about Jesus healing Simon's mother-in-law. It's part of a larger narrative about Jesus doing lots of healing, and followed by a description of many people with illnesses and demons coming to him. In Matthew, it comes after Jesus has healed a man with leprosy and remote-healed a centurion's servant. In Mark and Luke, it's after Jesus has cast out an impure spirit.

Jesus goes to Simon's house, where his mother-in-law is in bed with a fever. Without any drama, Jesus heals her. Matthew and Mark say that he takes her hand; Luke says that he rebukes the fever. It's all done with a minimum of fuss. Jesus goes to her, and she's better. And then she gets up and waits on them. I used to think that this seemed a bit unfair. Assuming that Simon is at least in his mid-twenties, his mother-in-law will be in her forties or possibly fifties, and a few minutes earlier she was ill in bed. But of course I was missing the point.

Authority figure

One of the things I like about Mark's Gospel is how fast everything happens. Apart from the fact that everything seems to happen "immediately" or "at once", Mark starts the action right from Chapter 1. There's no Nativity story, no long genealogy, just straight into the action. Right from the word go Jesus is healing people, teaching, casting out demons (and annoying the religious hierarchy). So it's only 21 verses into the Gospel that we have the story of Jesus healing a man who is possessed by an "impure spirit." 

Jesus has gone into the synagogue to teach. This isn't some kind of open mic Sabbath; Jesus is recognised as a Rabbi, a teacher, someone who is entitled and equipped to sit and teach everyone else. And people are amazed at his teaching. They say that he has authority. What do they mean?

I have died

In Colossians 3 Paul tells his hearers that they have died and their life is hidden with Christ in God. I'm assuming that this message was not just for the first-century believers in Colossae, but is is true for all Christians, including me. I find this incredibly comforting, not just for the part that says that my life is with Christ, but because it says that I have died. My old life is over, not just changed, or put on hold, or moved away from, but over. It is as finished as death. That's it, there is no going back. This is the immense reassurance of this passage. When I am in Christ my previous sins and mistakes, all my bad choices and poor judgements, are gone. They're not put to one side, or kept for ammunition in future disputes. I have died.

But how can the same sentence say that I have died, and that I have a life?

Blessed for a reason

In Genesis 12 we read the story of how God calls Abram (who later is renamed Abraham), and blesses him. This blessing is sometimes referred to as an "instrumental" blessing - it is a blessing to Abram, so that through him other people will be blessed. Later in the story, after Abraham is willing to sacrifice Isaac, God again says that through the blessing of offspring for Abraham, all nations on earth will be blessed. And when Abraham's grandson Jacob has a dream of a stairway to heaven, God blesses him and says that all peoples of the earth will be blessed through Jacob and his offspring.

Christians have understood these passages to refer to Jesus, who is a descendant of these Patriarchs, and through whom all people are blessed. But it's also useful to consider why God would give an instrumental blessing like this. What does it say to Abram, or to Jacob, that not only will they be blessed, but that they will also be a blessing?

Part of something bigger

This morning I was reading Genesis 10, which is one of the long lists of names that occasionally makes reading the whole Bible seem like more of a chore than a devotion (not that chores can't be devotions, but that's another topic). It tells where the nations known to the Israelites came from, in the form of a giant family tree. If the Bible is supposed to be the inspired word of God, why have we got this stuff about Joktan being the father of Hazarmaveth?

In pre-literate societies, you needed to memorise your ancestors and your extended family. If there were disagreements about grazing rights or ownership of property, you needed to be able to say "I am a direct line descendant of the person who originally owned this land, while you're only a second cousin." So we have an idea of why family histories form part of the oral history of Israel (the early books of the Bible), but what do they have to do with spiritual matters?

Who is going to harm you?

I use the YouVersion app on my phone for daily Bible readings, and each day, as well as my reading for the day, there's a verse of the day (which is sometimes two verses). Today's was 1 Peter 3:12-13. I have a couple of issues with this. The first is that verse 12 is actually the second half of a quotation from Psalm 34. Call me picky, but as far as I'm concerned this is the problem with isolating particular Bible verses, whether it's to put up on your bedroom wall or to send out as a verse of the day. The reader doesn't get any context. They don't know that Peter was quoting a Psalm (which his hearers might well have recognised without the need for footnotes), they don't get the rest of the quotation and they don't get the distinction between what Peter quotes and what Peter comments. It's like cutting and pasting the last sentence of a blog post, along with the top two random comments and posting it as a continuous piece of text, attributed to the blog author. Yes, it's on his/her blog, but it doesn't help the reader much.

My other issue, related to this, is verse 13. There it is, in isolation, proudly asking "Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good?" And the answer comes back "Quite a lot of people, actually." Being harmed when you're eager to do good? It happens every day. Now this blog post is not the place to give a long answer to the question, "Why do bad things happen to good people?", and the short answer[1] isn't that helpful.

Rainbow: All is good/all is God

The story of Noah's Ark is one that has crossed from the Bible into popular culture. Most people can tell you that the animals went in two by two, and even children of non-religious parents may find themselves with a toy ark featuring two of each unclean animal and fourteen of each clean animal and bird. (What, you don't remember that bit of the story?) And in the end all the good people are saved and all the bad people are drowned and we find that God loves the smell of roasting meat, which makes you wonder if He wouldn't prefer a Saturday night barbecue to a Sunday morning church service. And then God puts a rainbow in the sky as a sign that he's not going to destroy the earth with a flood ever again.

When I was young, I was taught that the rainbow reminds us of God's promise, and there are plenty of Christian cards and posters with a rainbow to show that God keeps His promises. Of course, it would be possible to be cynical and think "Gee, thanks for that promise not to drown the entire human race. I really appreciate that," but that's not the point of those lovely rainbow cards. They are intended to remind us that God does make promises and does keep them, and His promises include other things apart from ruling out specific forms of speciocide. 

But stop. Have another look at Genesis 9. The rainbow isn't a reminder for us. It's a reminder for God.

Cain and Abel, or, second-guessing God

Aside from being a source of many movie titles, the reading I looked at this morning, Genesis 4:1-6, also tells the story of the first sibling rivalry and the first murder. Thankfully for the human race, these two things don't always go together.

It's not impossible that Cain and Abel may represent the conflicts between wandering herdsmen and the first farmers, who settled in the fertile crescent in the fourth millennium BCE. It would be unsurprising if the new growers of crops took exception to herds wandering over their land, or if traditional herdsmen didn't object to farmers planting and ploughing their flock's pastures. Of course this doesn't mean the story isn't true, because the story is about Cain and Abel's relationship with God, and therefore about our relationship with God, whether it is a story of two actual brothers or a metaphor for two groups of people.

When Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree, and are confronted by God, they have no idea what's coming next. They feel guilt and shame for the first time, and try to pass the buck. The man blames the woman, the woman blames the serpent, but they tell God what actually happened, though they try to spin it to their own advantage. When Cain interacts with God, there's been a move on in mankind's thought. Cain knows that his parents were punished for wrongdoing, and he expects a certain kind of response from God. He second-guesses what God is going to do. 

Love is... not just for weddings

It's a lovely sunny summer Saturday, and all over the country people will be getting married. It's a fair bet that many of the church weddings will have the reading taken from 1 Corinthians 13, and why not? It's a good time to talk about love. But I was reading a few verses from this chapter earlier, and I was struck by verse 6. 

Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

It's easy to read this long list of the things that love is or isn't, that love does or doesn't do, and nod and smile and think, "Yes, that's nice" without ever stopping to consider: love does not delight in evil? Of course love doesn't delight in evil! What do you take me for? Why would anyone delight in evil? Anyway, it's a wedding and I don't want to talk about evil, thank you very much. But Paul is telling the Corinthians about unconditional love, love which never gives up and never gives in. This is the love that God has for sinners, a love so huge that he was prepared to die for us. This is the love that we should have for each other.

So how do we love someone who does something wrong? (And that's every single human being on the planet, by the way.)

The Transfiguration

Luke 9:28-36 tells the story of the Transfiguration. Jesus takes three of his disciples with him up a mountain to pray. While he's there, they see him differently. Luke makes it clear that although they're sleepy, it's when they wake up properly that they they see Jesus shining bright and glorious, and realise that Moses and Elijah are there too.

One of the obvious questions is "Why did Jesus share this with these three?"