The Bible Challenge: Day 158

The scriptures read are 2 Chronicles 23-25, Psalm 128 and 1 Corinthians 3.

2 Chronicles 23, 24. The story of the boy king Joash is really well told. Being hid in the temple, the intrigue surrounding his crowning and presentation to the people: just great. He refurbishes the temple. Then the high priest who was his mentor dies--at 130!--and the story turns tragic.

2 Chronicles 25. King Amaziah follows a similar arc as his dad: starts out good and goes bad. He even gets assassinated. But before that the king of Israel tears down 600 feet of Jerusalem's protective wall and loots the temple.

Psalm 128. This one is similar to the previous psalm. It links the fear of the Lord to a good life and the prosperity of Jerusalem to the prosperity of the person addressed.

1 Corinthians 3. Rapid fire metaphors: infants, farmers, builders, temple. Paul keeps the focus on who is essential--God, not clergy. Don't worship the servant. Everybody's got a job. Your salvation isn't on the line but your work for the kingdom is.

Paul is tossing off these very profound thoughts and then moving on. You are the temple of God and his Spirit lives in you. It's not a playground or a lego house that can be torn apart at a whim. God lives in you as his presence filled the temple. You could meditate for quite a while on the ramifications of that.

And how about this one: All things are yours--your favorite priest or preacher, the world, life, death, the present, the future--all of it is yours, and you are Christ's and Christ is God's. Why isn't that verse quoted more often?

The Bible Challenge: Day 157

The scriptures read are 2 Chronicles 20-22, Psalm 127 and 1 Corinthians 2.

2 Chronicles 20. The crowning moment of Jehoshaphat's kingship is when he prays to God to save Judah from a combined attack from the Moabites, Ammonites and Meunites. God confuses Judah's enemies so that they ambush and attack each other. Understandably, the neighboring peoples don't go to war with Judah while Jehoshaphat reigns.

2 Chronicles 21. Jehoram, the eldest son, becomes king and kills all his brothers. He get a warning from Elijah and not only is defeated militarily but dies of what sounds like colon cancer. Nobody misses him.

2 Chronicles 22. Another bad king and a bad queen. Lots of bloodshed. George R.R. Martin seems to have based his Game of Thrones series not only on England's War of the Roses but the books of Kings and Chronicles as well. He owes God royalties.

Psalm 127. The importance of God being part of all you do. Verses 4 and 5 have led some to fashion a "quiverful" movement, whereby devout couples get fruitful and multiply, having as many kids as they can, increasing the kingdom of God by procreation more than evangelization. I think the family in the 16 and Counting series follow this idea.

1 Corinthians 2. The deep wisdom of God is known only by the Spirit--but we can access it because we have the mind of Christ in us.

The Bible Challenge: Day 156

The scriptures read are 2 Chronicles 17-19, Psalm 126, and  1 Corinthians 1.

2 Chronicles 17-19. An expanded account of Jehoshaphat's reign. Nothing that says anything about his jumping, though.

Psalm 126. This one looks forward to God taking the present situation and turning it around into something much better. Jews recite this psalm as a grace with meals on the Sabbath. It is also inspiration for the hymn, "Bringing in the Sheaves."

1 Corinthians 1. At one point during my nursing I was starting to think getting old was a very sad time of life. Then I realized that as a nurse, all I was seeing was elderly people who were sick. (Duh!) They weren't necessarily a representative sample. When you read Paul's letters, you get the feeling that the early church had a lot of problems. Then you realize most of his letters were sent in response to problems certain churches had and were asking him about. His advice was so good that they were saved as opposed to any letter he wrote that said, "Just dropping a line to say how great your church is doing. Keep up the good work. Paul."

That said, the Corinthian church had some major problems. Part of that was that it was located in the original Sin City, Corinth. Seriously, the Greeks turn the town's name into a verb that meant "to get debauched." So some of what Paul says is aimed at very specific problems that the church in this party town was dealing with.

Paul begins with some beautiful passages about the gospel. Then he gets to the first problem. The church is turning into factions, cliques, with everyone choosing their favorite Christian leader. Paul wants to nip that talk in the bud. Paul reminds them that at the center of the faith is Christ and the cross. Who Jesus is and what he's done for us and how we respond to that is what's essential.

The Bible Challenge: Day 155

The scriptures read are 2 Chronicles 13-16, Psalm 125 and Romans 16.

2 Chronicles 13. OK, a major addition to the story of the Davidic rulers. In 1 Kings Abijah rates 2 paragraphs and most of what is said about him is bad. This is a lot more and his speech about God seems at odds with the pronouncement in Kings that he was a bad king. Unless the speech was mostly psy-ops against Israel.

2 Chronicles 14-16. Again an expansion of what 1 Kings says about Asa. He was a good king who seems to have gone bad towards the end.

Psalm 125. "Jerusalem, hills enfold it and the Lord enfolds his people..." "Do good, O Lord, to the good, to the upright in heart..."

Romans 16. Paul sends greetings to a lot of believers in Rome. At least 10 have slave names, 11 are women, 3 are Jews. He calls a woman Junias an apostle, which according to 1 Corinthians 9 means she also saw the risen Christ. He greets Priscilla and Aquila, a husband and wife ministry team who worked together. Notice that he mentions Priscilla first. The idea that Paul was a misogynist can't be proved from this letter.

Paul's secretary sends greetings. Also Paul says hello to Rufus. Is this the same Rufus who was the son of Simon of Cyrene, forced to carry Christ's cross?

The public official Erastus may be the same guy who is mentioned in an ancient inscription found by archeologists in Corinth. Which would make him the first Christian mentioned by name outside the New Testament.

A Good Person Doesn't Need Rules

The scripture referenced is Galatians 1:1-12.

When people say religions are all the same, they usually mean that their ethical rules are alike. That’s not quite true but there is a great deal of overlap. As you may have heard, most but not all religions have some form of the Golden Rule. Usually it is negative: don’t do to others what you wouldn’t want done to you. In a few religions, it is stated positively, namely to treat others as you wish to be treated. In comparative religion, it is called the Ethic of Reciprocity. You might also call it applied empathy. It’s a pretty basic moral rule and can be arrived at independently without reference to any theology.

So why do we have different religions and theologies? Why not just live by that rule? Of course that begs the question: why don’t we in fact live by a rule most of us see as the proper thing to do?

The answer is hinted at in an episode of Doctor Who. When one of his companions is kidnapped, the Doctor comes up with a very clever plan to get her back. The villain behind the plot sneers that it will be easy to defeat the Doctor because good men have to obey the rules. To which the Doctor replies, dangerously, “Good men don’t need rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”

The Doctor would find himself in agreement with Paul. A truly good person doesn’t need rules. And the letter to the Galatians, which we will be reading in our lectionary for the next several Sundays, explains why.

If you read enough of Paul’s letters, you notice that the opening of this one is different. It’s shorter, curt, and there’s no thanksgiving for the church he’s writing to. And it’s because he's upset. He needs to straighten up a big problem that has arisen among the Galatian churches. A group of Jewish Christians have been casting doubts on Paul’s apostleship and his characterization of the gospel. They feel that Gentiles who become Christians should be bound by the rites of the old covenant; in other words, the Gentiles had to get circumcised and follow Jewish law.

To Paul this totally negates the gospel, the good news that because of Jesus’ sacrifice God saves us by his grace alone. If God declares one righteous, one doesn’t need to try and earn that through rites and rituals. In essence by requiring Christians to observe and perform these rites, Paul’s opponents are saying Jesus’ death was not sufficient to save us. We need to add these other things to complete our salvation, according to them.

So Paul, you notice, beginning with his greeting, asserts his God-given authority as apostle and the fact that his gospel is one of grace, based on what God in Christ has done for us on the cross and on Easter morning.

If you’ve been active in our Bible Challenge, you’ve been going through the narrative portions of the Old Testament. And some parts are extremely difficult to read. God saves his people again and again and they betray him again and again. And it’s not like he doesn’t warn them over and over about the penalties of following other gods. So God comes off as frequently angry and scolding and punishing, rather like the parent of children in their terrible twos. But the Israelites are not little children. They have the law. But merely having or knowing the law doesn’t save you, or else all lawyers would be moral paragons. Paul as a zealous Pharisee knew firsthand how our perverse natural impulses can even turn the law into temptation. So Paul finds freedom, not only from sin but from the law, in God’s grace through simply trusting in him. To Paul, trying to save yourself by following the law is futile. It’s like trying to fix a broken leg through vigorous exercise. You need to go to a doctor and get the leg taken care of properly. It may even need to be rebroken so it can set properly. I couldn’t fix my neck and head pain with Excedrin and a soft cervical collar at bedtime any more. I needed to go to a surgeon who could remove the extruded discs and replace them and use marrow and stem cells from my pelvis and put in a titanium plate. I’m free from the pain now. I wish I had done it years ago.

Luther found relief from the pain of his acute awareness of his imperfection and sinfulness when he was assigned to teach Galatians. He had been trying to save himself through following the rules of his monastic order, frequent confession and even self-mortification. Discovering in Galatians and Romans that we are saved by grace through faith was a pivotal moment for him and indeed for the church at large.

Just like I had to be fixed by a surgeon, so our sin-damaged lives have to be set right by God. We can’t do it ourselves. In fact, we can make things worse, such as walking on a broken leg. Paul was not, as his critics charged, trying to please Gentile converts by loosening the requirements of salvation; he was protecting a vital truth. Our salvation doesn’t depend on ourselves but on God. That means, among other things, that our salvation is in better hands than our own. If God is who we rely on, rather than ourselves, we can be assured that our standing with him is secure. As Paul says in 2 Timothy, “if we disown him, he will also disown us; if we are faithless, he will remain faithful, for he cannot disown himself.” God's very nature of love is to be faithful. That’s why he never totally abandons Israel despite their sins. He is faithful. His name, which he gives Moses at the burning bush, can be translated “I will be there for you.”

All of our sins with which we have alienated ourselves from God have been dealt with by Jesus on the cross. Therefore we need not add any rites or practices to make ourselves “extra” saved. Once the doctor has brought you back with a defibrillator, you needn’t try to give yourself chest compressions to make sure you are “more” alive. Once saved from drowning and returned to dry land, you can stop dog paddling. Paul’s opponents were mistaking pre-op procedures for the surgery itself.

After the discovery of insulin but before researchers came up with a form that could be given to human beings, people were still dying from diabetes. Some patients, realizing that insulin was in the pipeline, tried to last until it was available by going on a dangerous diet. It was known that diabetics could not properly use the carbohydrates found in foods and that it was the buildup of unprocessed glucose in their blood caused a lot of the damage to their organs. So one doctor conceived of a diet in which the patients lived on a bare minimum of food and thus kept their blood sugar low. But it was so extreme that it put them at risk of malnutrition and even dying of starvation. Still it offered hope to those, especially young people, who knew a much better solution was just around the corner. Many survived to see the birth of insulin treatment and the possibility of a diabetic living a fairly normal life. But what if, after they were given insulin, they continued to eat next to nothing? That would negate the benefits that insulin was designed to give them.

Before the coming of Christ, circumcision and the dietary laws and the rituals of temple-oriented Judaism were the way for God’s people to deal with their sins. But now that Jesus had taken away their sins once and for all, they didn’t need to keep doing all that. The cure was here! Why keep acting as if it weren’t?

Of course, Paul was then accused of saying that since we need not and cannot do anything to save ourselves, that we need not do anything after being saved. Since righteous behavior cannot save us, we don’t have to behave righteously at all. That’s like saying after the doctor replaces your hip, you need not follow his orders anymore. The problem is if you don’t follow his post-op orders, you will not get much advantage from your new hip.

I’ve seen patients do this. Because rehab is hard and painful, they make excuses, do few or none of the exercises and end up as wheelchair bound as if they hadn’t had their hip replaced. I’ve seen patients who having had heart surgery go back to the fatty and fried foods that had a hand in damaging their hearts in the first place. I’ve seen patients finish breathing treatments for their lung disease and then go outside to smoke. The doctor gave them life when they would have died but they continued to do things that limited the benefits of that life.

Sin is not like an arbitrary penalty in a game; sins are attitudes and actions or inactions that threaten our spiritual health. We don’t behave better to save our lives but because, having been saved, we don’t want to do anything to compromise our new life in Christ but rather to enjoy it to its fullest.

And this is all due to God’s grace, his undeserved unreserved goodness towards us which we access by simply trusting him. We can trust him because he loves us. We know he loves us because of what he did in Christ. God became one of us in Jesus. He did what we should have but could not: he lived as one of us yet without sin. Then he took all of our sins, the sins on the whole world upon himself, let them die with him upon the cross and buried all our sins with him in the grave. Then he rose again, to bestow his life on us, new life, life unlimited by sin and the old rules meant to contain it.

When our rehab is over, we will not need any rules. We will not need a reminder to do this or not do that. That will be second nature to us. And thus we return to what the Doctor in Doctor Who said about rules. The truly good person doesn’t need them. He lives by the Spirit and therefore naturally produces the fruit of the Spirit, namely love. And that love encompasses joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. It only looks like the Spirit-led person is obeying rules to those who don’t understand how goodness can exist apart from them. Like someone who has only done one of those paint-by-numbers pictures might think that Da Vinci or El Greco or Michelangelo must have worked by an analogous process. I’m not saying they didn’t make sketches or plan things out but neither did they mechanically churn out their art by rigidly observing inviolable rules. Hitler did, though. His drawings and paintings were precise, realistic and devoid of life. He rarely included people, painting mostly buildings and landscapes dominated by buildings. Look them up and you can see why he couldn’t get into art school. There is a reason that we call great art inspired.

A good life is also inspired. The word “inspire” means “to breathe or blow into.” God inspires or blows into us his breath or Spirit. The Spirit animates our spiritual life as an idea animates an artist. The Spirit shapes our actions as the idea shapes the work the artist produces. A good artist knows when to follow the rules and when to bend them because the work demands it, just as Jesus knew when to violate the Sabbath in order to heal someone. And yet only someone with an uninspired and unimaginative mind, with an OCD-like devotion to the rules, would say Jesus was not a good man.  

If you look at most religions, you see the same rules, the way a surgeon, a chiropractor and a natural foods advocate will all tell you to avoid fatty, salty and sugary foods and exercise more. But if you have a broken hip, following those rules won’t help you. You need to trust the surgeon and let him give you a new hip. Afterward you need to follow his rehab regimen. And eventually you will not need the wheelchair, walker or cane. You won’t need to check if you are placing your foot properly or shifting your weight correctly. You will walk without regards to the once helpful but now superseded rules. When we in trust give ourselves to Jesus, we are saved entirely by grace of Christ. He puts in us his Spirit and if we walk by the Spirit, we will eventually find ourselves free of our enslavement to sin and the law, free to be what God intended us to be, free to love him without limits.

The Bible Challenge: Day 153

The scriptures read are 2 Chronicles 10-12, Psalm 124 and Romans 15.

2 Chronicles 10-12. We get the story of Rehoboam, the unwise son of Solomon, again. Maybe the reason scripture retells these stories is to emphasize to God's people just how often and how badly they disobeyed God. Yes, I know Chronicles has different emphases than Kings and additional material as well, but at this point it isn't that obvious. This read-through I am doing for flow and I'm trying not to be all scholarly and didactic and detail obsessed. And nothing has so far jumped out much and said, "Betcha didn't know this!"

Psalm 124. "Were it not for the Lord..." Good meditative exercise. What if God hadn't been in your life? What would have been different? Good way to stop taking him for granted.

Romans 15. The reason God gives us various strengths is to help those weak in those areas. "Strength is for service," as Peterson puts it. Bringing everyone's strengths together will cause them to mesh and compensate for everyone's weaknesses. Jewish and Gentile Christians need each other.

Ironic to read Paul's plans for a nice stopover in Rome on his way to Spain. After reading Acts, we know he will get to Rome but wonder if he ever made it beyond there.

The Bible Challenge: Day 152

The scriptures read are 2 Chronicles 7-9, Psalm 123 and Romans 14.

2 Chronicles 7-9. God accepts the temple and promises his presence there, provided Solomon and his descendants obey God and don't worship other gods.

We are given examples of Solomon's extravagance. We are not given examples of his failures, like marrying too many wives and letting them worship other gods. Chronicles did a similar job with David. We are getting the "good parts" version rather than a "warts and all" version we get in the accounts in 1st and 2nd Kings.

Psalm 123. A humble person praises God and asks him to do something about those who look down on him.

Romans 14. Don't make a fuss about other Christians with whom you have different convictions on some non-essential matters. Getting along with other Christians is essential.