The Purple Pumpkin

St Paul

2012-02-05T20:30:00.003Z

I hated that man Jesus.He called us ‘hypocrites’.
He called us ‘whitedsepulchres’.
He told the people,
That crowd of unwashedcountry folk
Who followed him everywherelike bedraggled sheep,
That they should be ‘morerighteous’ than us
To see the kingdom of God.
Of course I hated him.

People who used to look upto us

Began to mock us in thestreet.
Those who used to come tous for teaching
Went instead to him and hisband of rag-tag followers.
Of course I hated him.

He made me look deep insidemyself

And I didn’t like what Isaw.
Not righteousness for Godbut self-righteousness.
Not charity but pride inbeing better than others.
Better? In what way was I‘better’?
When was the last time Icame, unasked,
To the aid of the needy,the ignorant or the foolish?
When did I last serve Godwith grateful love
Rather than ritualobservance?
When did I last pray fromthe heart and not
In formulaic phrases,rendered meaningless
By years of repetition?
When did I ever askforgiveness for my failures
As a leader and as a man?
Of course I hated him.

But you, O my Lord JesusChrist,

In your grace and yourmercy, met me on that Damascus Road
And freed me from my fearsand my despising.
You blinded me with thelight of your glory so that
When my eyes were openedagain I would see the world newly.
I saw then that all menwere my brothers and my responsibility.
I saw that God was callingme to a new life.
I saw that my task and myjoy was to tell the world
How I love that Man, Jesus.

St John

2012-01-04T19:12:00.001Z

We walked everywhere with him during those three years.We walked the length and breadth of

Israel

,
From the

Jordan

to the sea.
We saw things that no man expects to see:
Water turned into the richest wine,
Crowds fed from five barley loaves and two small fish.
Sicknesses of all kinds cured,
The eyes of the blind opened, the ears of the deaf unstopped.
We saw cripples leap for joy, we saw lepers made whole.
And demons cast out.
And we heard teaching the like of which
Has not been heard before in

Israel

.
He told us that we were the salt of the earth, the light of the world.
He showed us God as our Father, merciful and loving.
He showed us that all men are made in the image of God,
That sinners can be brought to repentance,
That lost sheep can be found and brought home.
Who was this man who could do these things?
For he was a man, there was no doubt of that.
He ate and slept with us, he grew weary beyond weariness
As the crowds pressed around him demanding his compassion.
We saw him angry and we saw him grieving.
Yet he was more than a man. Noman alone could do
The things he did; no man alone could teach as he taught.
Peter got it right: when Jesus asked us
Who we thought he was,
Peter spoke for all of us when he said,
‘You are the Messiah, the Son of God’.
We had seen his work and heard his words
And pondered them in our hearts, discussed them over the fire
In the evening, when he had gone aside to pray.
Who were we, fishermen of Galilee, taxcollectors, everyday folk
That we had been chosen to be his followers?
He could have walked with kings and princes.
Instead he walked to the cross
And we saw him die.
Bur death could not hold this man
Who was God. We saw him risen andknew
That the world would never be the same again.

Feeding the 5000

2011-12-07T20:20:00.001Z

There were overfive thousand there that day,And every one ofthem tired and hungry.

‘Feed them’, hesaid,

As if manna wouldfall from the sky

As it had done inthe desert.

Even if we had hadthe money,

We could not havefound enough bread in that remote place

To feed so many.

Then a boy came upto me;

‘You can have mylunch, if it helps’, he said.

I looked and therein his basket

Were five barleyloaves and two small fish.

I couldn’t hurthim by refusing his gift but how far would it go

Among so many?

But we had learnednever to say ‘Impossible’ when we were with Jesus.

So I took the boyand his gift over to the Teacher.

He looked withsuch love at the boy
As he took thesmall basket.
He blessed thefood, thanked his Father for the provision

And began handingit to us to give to the crowd,

Seated now aroundthe mountainside.

And, believe it ornot,

I saw it with myown eyes,

Those five loavesand two small fish

Fed the wholecrowd with twelve baskets of scraps

Left over.

That gift, freelygiven by a loving heart, was taken by God

And made more thansufficient for the need.

Fishers of Men

2011-10-31T19:46:00.002Z

Fishing in the deep laketakes courage and trust in God
To battle the elements;
It takes wits as the fishtry to evade capture.
It’s not an easy thing
To make your living byfishing in Galilee.
You can be out all nightwithout a single catch
Or come home with the netsstraining
And more fish than themarket can take.
All or nothing, that’s thefisherman’s life.

On a sunny afternoon

The young men sat on theshore
Mending their nets,
Not thinking of anythingvery much.
A shadow fell across thestony beach:
‘Follow me; and I will makeyou
Fishers of men’.
Was it a command or apromise?
Such was his authority thatthey rose,
Left their nets and theirboat,
And followed him.
They followed him aroundthe lake,
Listening to his preaching,
Marshalling the crowds,
Carrying the tiredchildren;
They marvelled at thehealings,
The exorcisms,
The loving care he showedto all.
They followed him on thedusty roads
To Jerichoand Jerusalem.
But they couldn’t followhim to the cross –
Not yet, anyway –
That was something he hadto do by himself.
They had learned more thanthey knew
During the three years whenhe had led them
And the Holy Spiritinspired a new boldness in them.
Now they followed his ways,
Preaching and teaching,
Healing and freeing,
Setting out the kingdombefore the people
To draw them to Christ.

It took courage and trustin God to battle the Pharisees

And wit to frustrate thosewho would obstruct them.
It was not an easy life,
Being fishers of men.
But the early training on thelake
Had accustomed them to hardwork and disappointment
As well as to the joy of agood catch.
The new call had come
Both as a command and as apromise
And they followed him toglory.

Wedding at Cana

2011-10-13T17:54:00.002+01:00

It was one of thebiggest weddings of the season.

The bride’s fatherwas rich and invited all the community.

We were hired fromall around to come and work.
It was really busy–
All thepreparations, and then the guests arriving:
Hundreds of them,it seemed, far more than expected.
Probably they allinvited their sisters and cousins from the neighbouring villages!
There was dancing,there was eating, and a lot of drinking –
Toasts to thehappy couple, toasts to the parents,
Then toasts toeach other and to anyone else they could think of.
I was kept on mytoes, I can tell you,
Running hither andyon to get the bottles
And pour the wineinto the outheld glasses.
I couldn’t believeit when the steward told us
There was no morewine!
It was a disaster,the Master would be shamed in front of all his friends!
The steward wasclearly troubled
And Mary came toask what the problem was.
Mary always has aneye on what’s going on,
She makeseverything run smoothly wherever she is,
Born to care, mymother always says.
The steward wasn’tembarrassed telling her,
She always seemsto understand everything.
She told him notto worry, she would find a way.
I saw her go overto her son and say something to him.
He didn’t look toopleased at first,
Then smiled ruefullyas a son will to his mother.
She said to us,‘Do exactly as he tells you’.
He told us to fillthe big purification jars with water
And we obeyed, though we couldn’t see how that would help.

It took us a fewminutes – they are big, those jars,

And impossible tolift when full.
Then he said,‘Draw the wine and give it to the guests’.
Wine? It was waterwe put in those jars.
But, sure enough, it was wine we drew out.
Clear as water,slightly green in colour
But with a scentof flowers and fruit and summer like you’ve never known.
It made you feelgood just to smell it.
We were sentquickly to fill up the empty glasses –
People werebeginning to look around for us,
Wondering where wewere.

I overheard oneguest say to the Master
That he had savedthe best wine till last
And it was betterthan any he had tasted.
No-one but uswaiters and the steward
Knew what hadhappened: I don’t know if the Master ever knew.
So how do you getgood wine from jars of water?
Mary’s son hadalways been special but this?
I wouldn’t believeyou if you had told me:
This wasimpossible, yet I had seen it with my own eyes.
A man who could dothis could do anything.

The Leper

2011-10-08T12:28:00.002+01:00

No-one would touch a leper:

‘Unclean! Unclean!’ and

Horrifyingly contagious.

But he came among them,

Breaking the law,

Braving the crowd

Which parted before him like

The walls of water in the Red Sea,

Opening the road to Salvation.

‘If you are willing, you can make me clean’.

The women drew back their skirts in horror,

The men shrank away lest their sleeve

Come into contact with his rags.

And Jesus?

As if it were the most natural thing in the world

He reached out and placed his hand on the other’s shoulder,

Man to man,

Made in the image of God.

The crowd looked on in appalled fascination

At their beloved Teacher

Touching the living dead.

And Jesus only said:

‘I am willing: be clean’.

And the man stood there, restored, made whole,

A new man, a man recalled to the fullness of life.

Nothing is so terrible that Christ won’t touch;

Nothing so loathsome that Christ will turn away;

Nothing so unforgivable that it has not already

Been forgiven on the Cross.

Darkness and Light

2011-03-23T17:46:00.000Z

When God first formed the earth, when it was ‘without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep’ it must have been such a thick impenetrable darkness, where you would be able to see absolutely nothing at all. The human eye requires an input of light, however tiny: when we say that our eyes adapt to the dark, they actually simply adapt to a lesser light. Those creatures who live in the very depths of the oceans, where the darkness must be as it was in the first days, are almost always, perhaps always (I don’t know enough about it) blind. There is no point in their having sight when there is no light. They use sonar and radar and other ways of experiencing their surroundings.

Then God spoke: ‘Let there be light’ – and light was. What is interesting, though, is that for a brief moment light and darkness must have co-existed, because we are told that God separated the darkness from the light: so initially they were together, as good and evil can co-exist in one person. God did not banish darkness; it has a part to play in the creation. He gave it a separate existence and a dedicated time. We are so used to associating darkness with evil that perhaps we have to readjust our thinking to some extent. Darkness is beneficial, restful, peaceful. Some people find it almost impossible to sleep unless the room is very dark; some animals only come out at night. Sleep, which our bodies expect to do in the dark hours, is vital for our physical and psychological wellbeing: non-stop light is used as a torture and a disorienting device; our body clocks are attuned to a rhythm of darkness and light. It is a strange thing that we call the combination of night-time and daylight ‘a day’ using the more positive word for the two: in the same way, we who are both sinner and saint are known as ‘saints’: the darkness and the sin are outweighed by the light and the holiness. We are told, too, that ‘the evening and the morning were the first day’ etc: it would make more sense to say ‘the morning and the evening’ but with the phrase as it is in the bible, we have the morning, the light, the grace of God, as the final word. There is no evening to the seventh day; God’s grace has won out.

Yet the contrast between darkness and light runs right through the bible and is also used metaphorically, as I said, to indicate the play of good and evil. Light is entirely necessary for most life forms and with light usually comes warmth. The sun was venerated as a god throughout the ages as the cold, dark winter days gave way to the life-giving, crop-growing warmth of spring and summer. Yet in some places, where to us in Britain the sun comes as a friend, there are parts of the world where it is almost an enemy, to be hidden from, to be endured as it beats down unmercifully.

We use phrases all the time that equate light with knowledge: ‘that puts a new light on it’, ‘casting light upon a subject’, ‘seeing something in a new light’: and the opposite: ‘I’m completely in the dark about that’.

So, imagine the total darkness of the pre-light world and the coming of God’s light. To me, the most poetic verse in the entire bible is in Isaiah where it says, ‘the people who walked in darkness have seen a great light’. If you are in the light, you think how wonderful it is that the light should come into the darkness and illuminate the people: but if you are used to that total blackness, where you might as well be blind for all you can see, the light would come surely as something of a mixed blessing: perhaps something to be feared at first as your eyes shut automatically to protect themselves, as your mind assimilates this new thing, as you suddenly have to take in a whole new landscape that was hidden from you before. And as you become more and more used to the light, you will take in more and more detail of what you can see, you will perhaps understand things that you did not understand before. It sounds so amazing that the light should come, but when you stop and think, how would it really feel? If you are expecting it, a sunrise for example, and you are prepared, it is completely wonderful; but if it comes from nowhere, wouldn’t it be a little scary? In the same way, it seems to me, when the light that is God and telling of God first comes to people, it can be frightening as new things so often are; but as you become accustomed to it, you will see it in more detail and understand things hidden from you before.

Most of the verses that came instinctively to my mind when preparing this were from the New Testament, when the Light of the World became man. In some ways, it can be compared to a sunrise in that the Jews were expecting a Messiah who would deliver them – not this Messiah, mostly, but they were expecting something wonderful to happen. But there were those who recognised him straightaway, notably Simeon in the temple (Luke 2:29-32): ‘For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.’ Simeon could see in this tiny baby what others could not see in the grown man: he could see God’s hand bringing light into the world; not the light of initial Creation but a new light. In Dickens’ story of a Christmas Carol, can you remember what Christmas Present hid under his robe and what he said? He said beware of these two, the girl is ignorance and the boy is want. Ignorance and want are the enemies of humanity and part of the light that Christ brings is knowledge and God’s promises.

Perhaps the best known quotations of all come from John: ‘In him was life; and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it’ ‘.The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world’. Also, from his first letter: ‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him and walk in darkness, we lie and do not tell the truth’. ‘And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil’. Light is that which enables us to see clearly; darkness is equated here with ignorance, with untruth, with deception.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus talks about our eyes: ‘The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!’ (Matthew 6:22-23) Our eyes are the only way we can see; if we shut our eyes, light cannot enter. If we have cataracts or glaucoma or some other disease of the eyes, or the optic nerve, we will not see clearly. If we refuse to look and recognise Jesus, the light of salvation cannot reach our hearts. If we refuse to learn, to listen, to look properly at what is around us, we will live in a state of internal darkness. We may call it light, but it is doubly dark because intentional. Part of our responsibility as human beings is to look for the truth – the immortal truths, as we have said before, not an expedient ‘truth for me’ which is variable and subjective.

As you probably know by now, I have a great affection for the King James: partly because I feel that the modern translations are too explanatory and cut off a lot of possible associations and meanings. I feel this about the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13: the NIV says: Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face’. In the authorised Version it says: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face; now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known’. To me, the mirror reflection suggests that you are looking at yourself and your own world and not seeing clearly; but ‘through a glass, darkly’ implies a wide-ranging lack of knowledge, which flows into the following phrases. The glass is more like a window than a mirror: you are looking outwards. It may not be the image that is unclear, as in the NIV, it is the looker who is unable to make sense of what he sees because he does not have the information to decode it.

We talked previously about the equation between blindness and not-knowing. As I have tried to show earlier, blindness and darkness carry the same message of not seeing, not knowing. When Saul had his vision on the road to Damascus, he was blind as he was led into the city. The overwhelming light was too much, his eyes were not used to it, his heart and brain were not ready for it: so he was given a short period of blindness to come to terms with a whole new way of seeing. The blindness marked an end to his Pharisaic terms of thought and behaviour and his restored sight was the beginning of a new life, clarified by a new light. We talked about Bartimeus and the other blind men who came to Jesus for healing: he asked each of them what they wanted and their answer was, ‘I want to see.’ We have to want to see the new truth before it will be given to us.

There is a poem by Robert Frost about mending a stone wall between his property and his neighbour’s. He says he doesn’t really understand why there should be a wall there as he has apple orchards and his neighbour has pine trees and they cannot hurt each other. The poet waxes a little fanciful about why the wall should fall: ‘I could say ‘elves’ to him but it’s not elves exactly, and besides, I’d rather he said it for himself.’ He then says of the neighbour ‘he moves in darkness as it seems to me, not of woods only and the shade of trees.’ His father had told him that ‘good fences make good neighbours’ and, the poet says, he liked this phrase so much that he could not reason around it. The neighbour is closed to anything he cannot see or touch, he lives by habit and his mind cannot escape and seek truth outside. Such people will never be able to understand Jesus’ message, will shut their eyes against the light, will turn their backs and go back into the warm, welcoming, comfortable and unthreatening darkness. The darkness demands nothing of you, as ignorance demands nothing of you: to look at the world in the light of day and to appreciate its beauty and its intricacy requires a modicum of effort: to try to understand your own place in the creation, to learn about God and Jesus and to understand about obedience and freedom requires a great deal. People have the impression that ‘freedom’ is an absolute good available to everyone: but true freedom is very difficult to handle, it comes with great responsibility and makes great demands, otherwise it simply turns into anarchy and chaos. Being free in the kingdom of God still demands an effort on our part, obedience and acceptance of God’s law.

Candle Time

2011-03-15T17:47:00.000Z

‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said: ‘Let there be light’ and there was light. (Light match and candle). God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.’

The first words spoken in this universe were to establish light for us. light and darkness, good and evil, knowledge of God and ignorance of him: these are the great themes of the bible. (read John 1:1-14)

When Jesus came, he said: ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.’ (John 8:12)

God has placed his light within each of us, a tiny flame like the flame of this candle but a flame that will grow in each of us as we draw nearer to God: and as we spread the Word of God the light in the world grows and the darkness cannot stand against it.

Light the candle of each person in turn, with a short text to go with it e.g.
God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)

The people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned. (Matthew 4:16)

My eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel. (Luke 2:30-32)

The Lord is my light and my salvation. (Psalm 27:1)

Let us walk in the light of the Lord. (Isaiah 2:5)

‘It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the Gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.’ (Isaiah 49:6)
You are the light of the world. ..Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good deeds and praise your Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 5:14)
You were once darkness but now you are light in the Lord. (Eph 5:8)
‘The fruit of light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth’ (Eph 5:9)
As we light our candles to reflect the light of the world and as we pray, the burning flame symbolises our prayer reaching up to God.

Pray silently now for the sister on your right and on your left and then for the whole group.

Remember that you are not alone: the Holy Spirit always prays within you and you are one of millions of Christians throughout the world, part of a prayer chain longer than you can imagine; but you are also an individual, known and loved by God for who you are. You are unique and your prayer is unique and special to God.
Let us place each candle in the garden to continue burning and to make one great light as we move into a time for private prayer and meditation.

Adam and Eve

2011-03-02T17:47:00.000Z

The story of Adam and Eve must be one of the best known in the Western world, even among non-believers. It is the beginning of the relationship between God and earth and the beginning of Satan’s power over this world. I am not expecting to tell you anything you don’t know, but it is always useful to look at some of these stories again.

Adam was made on the sixth day of Creation. He was the pinnacle – every lesser thing – animal and vegetable – and everything necessary to his life and comfort – light, land, water, sun, moon and stars – had been completed; the stage was set, if you like, for the entrance of the hero. He was the highest point of creation and everything had to be perfect for his arrival. God made the very best world for his creatures to inhabit. Yet it is interesting that this hero, this culmination of the great creation, who you would expect to be made of gold leaf or the cloth of heaven, was made not of the stuff of angels but of the dust of the earth. He is by nature totally part of this world, this creation, not something brought in from outside but is one with this universe; and at the same time God breathed life into him making him also part of the world of spirit.

In all the creation story up the now, God has acted as a single person: by word or by action, God spoke certain things into being and made others but here for the first time, we have a plural: ‘Let us make man in our image’. There is a change in tone, a new solemnity, moving from a word of command (let there be light) to a word of plan-making. There has been consultation in the Trinity, a plan devised, a decision made. The single voice then comes back until the end: in verse 22 we have: ‘And the Lord God said, ‘the man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil’. Man is the product of a communal endeavour, and we are in the image of all three persons. We have a likeness to God the Father, a likeness to Jesus the Son and a likeness to the Holy Spirit. We talked in our first season as a cell group about creation and discussed to some extent in what way we are made in ‘God’s image’. We do not see God as having two hands and feet and toe nails that need cutting every couple of weeks: but we know that in some way, we share God’s being. It was quite clear from the beginning of man’s story that God would interact with his new creation and therefore it was necessary that man have a form that would be able to accommodate the incarnation. Long before Christ was ‘made flesh’, he was able to visit this world by adopting the form of a man – wholly God and not yet man except in his outer disguise.

I have no doubts in saying that it was Christ who came in the OT in the form of a man. We are told in the gospels that ‘No-one has seen the Father but the Son’. Therefore the times in the OT when ‘the Lord’ or the ‘Angel of the Lord’ appeared, I think we can be confident that it was Christ who came – Christ who was impatient to show his love and his concern for the Trinity’s creation. In Hebrews we are told that Jesus is ‘the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being’ and Jesus told Philip that, having seen him (Jesus) Philip had seen the father. Jesus and the Father are not interchangeable but the one reflects the other exactly, so when we are told that someone had seen the Lord, I think we can take this as being the Son.

The image of God found in man is usually thought of to be entirely non-physical. The image is made up of abstracts, like our appreciation of beauty, our ability to examine ourselves, our conscience, our ability to make meaningful choices. If we could not choose not-God then the image of God would not be true in us, we have to be able to make choices that have consequences. If we could only ‘choose’ to love God and to follow his ways, we would not be reflecting God’s image for he has no such constraint upon him. But there must also be some physical characteristics: Jesus is to take this body upon himself for eternity; it cannot be something that does not sit well with his godhead. We are told by Paul that we will have ‘a glorious resurrection body’ when the time comes. We will not be bodiless spirits hovering unseen but will be visible as Jesus is the visible image of God – an image has to be visible, you can’t have an invisible image, it is a contradiction in terms. We also have the physical faculty of speech which is, as we know, something we share with the Lord God, who spoke the universe into being. Jesus is the Word and the word was with God and the word was God. Speech is part of the image of God.

It is clear from Genesis 2:15 – ‘and the Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and keep it’ - that Adam was not created in the garden, though the garden was created for him. God made a place for man, led him to that place and gave him a job to do: not just to enjoy being in this paradise but it was his responsibility to take care of it. Do we appreciate God doing this in our lives? Adam could see God, we cannot, but does that make the leading any less true? Did God lead (or put us) into our homes, our places of work and our places of worship, and did he give us responsibility in that place? Does that thought alter how you think of the various places in your life? God says, this is where I want you to be. In that place that he had chosen for Adam he gave him complete freedom apart from one small restriction: he has done the same for us, all the beautiful things of the world are there for us to enjoy provided we bear in mind those few things that God has forbidden us.

The next thing the Lord did was to show Adam how to begin his work: he brought all the animals one by one to be named. This would have the effect first of all of showing Adam the enormous variety of God’s creation from the smallest to the largest – it must have taken some long time to do this; but perhaps the best thing about this scene is that Adam is working with the Lord, with each naming he is presumably growing in confidence and in the assurance that he is considered to be part of this great creation work. God could have named all the beasts, no trouble, but he left it to Adam to have a part in this. God was accepting Adam’s decisions, Adam must through this have come to realise that he was more than the animals, he was in fellowship with the Creator: what a feeling must have been building up in him during all this time!

In verse 18 God had already said that it was not a good thing for Adam to be alone, but it is not until verse 21, after the ceremony of naming was over, that he put Adam into the deep sleep and created a companion for him. It is a lovely picture, that while Adam slept, the Lord was watching over him and was still working for Adam’s good, even after all that has already been done for him. And when Adam awoke, the Lord ‘brought the woman’ to Adam. This image in my mind is exactly reflected in our marriage service when the woman is given away – who giveth this woman? God does. I used to think this was more to do with ‘woman as chattel’ in history but after studying this passage more closely, I came to realise that it is way beyond that, it is God’s gift.

God now obviously left the couple alone, naked and innocent in their beautiful garden which was theirs to take care of and to enjoy. It is in His absence that the serpent gets the opportunity to come forward and put a spanner in the works. The devil puts a question deliberately phrased to suggest an untruth: Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’ Eve puts him right about this, she makes the fatal mistake of entering into conversation (it’s the same today with con men – once you answer a question and begin a conversation, they can do their misleading work on you). The devil then makes an assertion, ‘You will not surely die’. He gives no proof of this assertion apart from suggesting that God is using this prohibition to somehow cheat them: that he is denying them the possibility of being more than they are, withholding from them something which it would be to their benefit to have. That God is jealous and does not want them to attain this knowledge that he has. Nothing else has changed: the tree has been there since the beginning, but now Eve looks at it with different eyes and begins to feel dissatisfied. Verse 6 of chapter 3 says: ‘and when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her, and he did eat.’ What is this but what we have talked of before, the deadly sins of greed, lust of the eyes and covetousness? Before she has even given in to the temptation, sin is having its way with her. It brings to my mind the three hateful phrases again: she felt she was worth it, she felt it was a ‘must-have’ item and she felt it was ‘to die for’, since she had been told that that would be the result; these temptations are still alive and well in our century. And what is the first thing we try to do when we know we have done something wrong but to try and persuade someone else to do the same, as if our guilt will be less if it is shared. The serpent had implied to Eve that there was nothing to fear, there would be no uncomfortable consequences such as the predicted death, but even so, fear enters the world immediately after their disobedience. Craig preached a short while ago and said that with the fruit mankind received a number of things he was not supposed to have: he received guilt and fear among other things. We know with hindsight that God’s prohibition was for mankind’s protection and well being: but do we see this as clearly in our own lives when we are faced with a temptation and cannot understand what is wrong with following that path? If God says no, that should be enough for us: but somehow it so seldom is, we want to know why and we rationalise as Eve did the information before us: and too often, we persuade ourselves that what we want to do it the best thing for us. We simply don’t trust God enough to take his word.

The result of the disobedience is well-known: ‘the eyes of both of them were opened and the realised that they were naked’. The serpent had promised that if they ate the fruit, their eyes would be opened, and this is exactly what happened: sometimes even the devil says things that are true. But what exactly does it mean when it says, ‘they realised that they were naked’? They have never had clothes to wear and it has not bothered them. Perhaps it means more than this: perhaps in the beginning they were clothed with a glory, a glorious body like unto the resurrection body; perhaps they were clothed in righteousness. Perhaps when they ate from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they lost this glory and they knew that from this moment they were indeed naked before God, that something had been lost which had been their beauty, their robing. They are now in some indefinable way incomplete, and they make an effort to rectify this for themselves: they sew fig leaves together to make a covering for themselves. This can never be more than a partial and temporary answer: the fig leaves will have to be replaced on a regular basis: man cannot ever make up himself for what he has lost. We try to deal with our situation before God in all sorts of ways in our history: we think that education will help, that science, politics, religion are the answer to life’s problems, that we can deal with them ourselves and don’t need help. All these things are our fig leaves to try and cover up the fact that we have lost the glory that God meant us to have. We try to find answers in our own strength to what we know is beyond us, something we are searching for all our lives. Adam and Eve realised that they were newly exposed before God in some way, and they tried to hide from him as a result of their disobedience. From now on, we will all spend our lives trying to hide things from other people, sometimes from ourselves, and from God, though we know this is not possible. They are not only hiding their new nakedness, but by hiding that from him, they think they can also hide the fact that they disobeyed him: they are trying to hide both the act and the consequence.

I have always felt that verse 8 is one of the saddest in the Bible: ‘the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden’. (The authorised version says that they heard the voice of the Lord God, other translations say they heard the ‘sound’ which implies a physical presence, footsteps and the brushing against trees perhaps. This is more consistent with the later part of the story which we will come to.)

They uniquely had the privilege of walking and talking with God the creator and by their own action they had destroyed that relationship. It is man who hid from God, as we have discussed before, not God who turned away from man: in fact from this point on the whole bible, the whole history of man, has been God seeking out his children: ‘Where are you?’ This is a question that God asks of all his children and it is a question we have to answer for ourselves – especially if we are not in the place where God expects us to be! Where are you in your physical life? Where are you in your spiritual life? Why have you hidden from me? Why are you not doing the task I gave you? Do you believe lies against me? Where are you? Each of us has to answer these questions for ourself.

It must have been an amazing relationship, that the Lord would come in the cool of the evening and walk and talk with his people: but now it is spoiled by man’s own recognition of his guilt before God. Guilt always ruins a relationship, even among friends, so how much more between creator and creation, and guilt leads to fear. Although God obviously knows exactly what has happened, he makes Adam speak out – and what does Adam do but pass the blame to Eve and also to God himself – this woman that you gave me. Do we do this, do we sometimes blame God himself for the things we do wrong – well, if you hadn’t done this for me, the other would not have happened. Eve in her turn passes the blame to the serpent. It is so hard for us to stand before God and say yes, it was me, I did wrong. We find excuses and other people or circumstances to blame in the hope that we will deflect any punishment.

This chapter contains both the judgement and the promise. Judgement always has to follow admission of sin: the immediate sentence passed is the conflict, pain and sorrow of this life, but the eventual outcome will be the glory of life eternal with God himself.

We are all familiar with the curse put on the serpent and upon all creation: and how, at the same time, we are given the great good news that Jesus will come and will save us all. There is one last element in this story: we see in action the atonement, when the Lord takes the skins of animals and covers their nakedness. From this very first instance of sin we see that it takes an animal sacrifice, as it will throughout the OT, a shedding of blood: death has entered the world as a result of sin and by God’s own hand: and we see that the Lord removes the fig leaf garments the two had made for themselves in a vain effort to hide their guilt and he himself makes garments of skin for them: he through his unfailing grace covers their sin by his own hand. In the same way God will strip away all the false things we try and use to cover our nakedness, our ignorance, our disobedience, and he will give us back the robes of righteousness that we can never obtain by our own means.

Adam and Eve had to leave the garden as a result of the sin that had now entered the world through them: but they went out into the world not as lost but as saved sinners, covered by the blood shed by Jesus on their behalf, covered by garments of righteousness that he had fashioned for them. It is not the end of their story, it is the beginning of a story of hope triumphant time and again over sin and despair; and Jesus was there in person at the beginning of the story as at the end. Everything is safe in his hands, he is in control and although the serpent may have temporary authority over this world it is only temporary, the end has been foreseen and cannot be in any doubt, for it is the end planned from before time by the three persons who created us.

Responsibility

2011-01-27T18:46:00.002Z

Last time we were considering fear and how allowing it power over us is dishonouring to God. Another way we dishonour the Lord is by taking for granted his gifts to us and by mistreating them. The first great gift given to each of us by God is our physical body.

Every single thing that we have in this world is a gift of God, and as such we should care for it as a precious thing. This is especially true of our body – it is the most basic possession that God has given to each one of us in his love and it is up to us to take care of it – to watch what we eat and drink and inject and inhale, to live a healthy life insofar as it lies within our ability: you may not be able to prevent all diseases but you can certainly prevent some abuses which lead to disease.

Binge drinking, obesity and drug taking are growing problems in our society and each of them destroys our physical well-being as well as causing huge problems in wider society. We are told in the Bible that our bodies are a temple of the Lord, that he dwells within us. Is it not then our responsibility to keep that temple in good order? Greed (in all its forms, physical, emotional or psychological) is one of the seven deadly sins for good reason, for these are the sins that will kill your soul. This is not to deny any occasions of feasting and celebration, but it does deny excess and abuse. Jesus enjoyed a party, he was called a wine bibber and a glutton by his enemies so we know that when it was appropriate he ate and drank well: but in his travels with his disciples he lived frugally, as he did in the desert.

And from the very simple basic premise of treasuring our bodies would flow such an enormous change in the society that we live in that it is almost unimaginable: if alcohol were treated sensibly, if people refrained from taking addictive drugs, if we gave more thought to what we eat there would be no more drunken vomiting or fighting on the streets with broken bottles or feet as weapons: no more stealing to pay for drugs, no more avoidable diseases draining the health service, no more families broken by drink or drugs. The many children born addicted to heroin would not have this handicap before they even see the light of day, many others would no longer be living in daily fear of an unpredictable parent’s moods.

God has promised us the riches of heaven, he has promised that we shall reign with him: but he tells us in the parable of the talents that if we cannot be trusted with small things we will never be trusted with great ones. If we fall down on the trust placed in us to look after our earthly body during our lifetime here, how will God ever trust us with our resurrection body, with the treasures of heaven and of kingship? If we abuse what is both the most basic gift he gives us, why should he trust us with anything else?

Be trustworthy in the small things and you will be amazed at how God will trust you with the great.

Greatest gift of all is God himself

2011-01-20T17:47:00.002Z

Christmas is over for us now, with its cards and carols, festive food and presents…yet in some countries the children are still waiting for their gifts.

It’s easy to think that the way we do things is the way they are done everywhere else. In fact in some countries the children get their presents earlier or later than ours. One story explaining our tradition of Father Christmas has come to us from Bishop Nicholas in Turkey, who, hearing of a poor family with several daughters for whom there were no dowries, threw some golden coins down the chimney where they landed in the girls’ stockings hung up to dry by the fireplace. In remembrance of this, many countries maintain a tradition of having small gifts and sweets on St. Nicholas Day, 6^th December, as well as at Christmas.

In Belgium, St Nicholas’ Day is the day the children look forward to as they do not receive presents on Christmas Day. Nor do children in Mexico; it is thought that Christmas is not the time for gifts as this day is a celebration of the life of our Saviour and gifts instead are given on Twelfth Night, 6^th January, when we commemorate the arrival of the Kings with their presents of gold and frankincense and myrrh. In Spain and Gibraltar also, the wise men are remembered as children receive their presents on this day, and in Syria, children receive their presents on New Year’s Day from the youngest of the camels that brought the wise men to Bethlehem! In Russia under communism, when religion was frowned upon, Father Frost distributed his gifts on New Year’s Day: today, children have to wait until January 7^th, since the Russian Orthodox Church is governed by the old Julian calendar.

However, if you really like giving and receiving presents, Latvia is the place to be: there, gifts are exchanged on each of the twelve days of Christmas, starting on Christmas Eve!

So if you enjoy giving and receiving presents and are prepared to travel quite extensively, it is possible to extend the festive season from 5^th December to 7^th January! And you thought it was all over in one day….

However, all these different dates and customs make no difference to the central fact: that what we are celebrating in our various ways is the greatest gift ever given – the gift of God himself, born as a human child, to show us the way to salvation and everlasting glory. It is easy to spend Christmas in a haze of joyful celebration, and indeed we should celebrate how God came down to earth in the person of his son, but we should never forget that the gifts from the kings represent the kingship, the divinity and the death of this one babe.

Grumbles

2011-01-11T19:49:00.001Z

"Oh isn't your life extremely flat" wrote Gilbert in one of his operettas, "with nothing whatever to grumble at?" And we do like a good grumble, don't we?

There is a whole host of onomatopoeic words to describe this - grumble, grouse, gripe, beef, whinge, bellyache, moan, complain, whine - and we like to make the most of it. Any hard-luck story of mine you will cap, and I will try to cap that - you waited half an hour for a bus? I waited an hour and a half. The traffic on the A12 was bad - you should have been on the M1 with us. Your children are causing you problems? Mine are out of my control entirely.

But the more we focus on these negative things, the more we become aware of other small niggles that bask in the attention we lavish on them and in that warmth, grow into large issues. We don't count the trains that arrive on time, just the one that is late. We don't think of all the cheerful shop assistants, just the one who was a bit short with us that morning. We get a positive pleasure out of working out just how badly done by we are... And if someone dare ask us how we are, in this mood we're only too likely to tell them!

But think of those people who are a pleasure to be with, relaxing and comfortable. They are not the moaners of this world but the ones who accept cheerfully what life brings them, good and bad. They are the ones who will say, "I'm fine, thanks" even if they have just received bad news. They are the ones who will listen to your grousing without trying to make you feel that they have had a much worse deal than you have had. They do not need to prove how much they suffer in order to feel important.

Perhaps this is why we are told to "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, Rejoice". If we can remember to thank the Lord for the many benefits we have received - starting with the fact that we have just woken to a new day - then other things seem to fall into place and we realise how trivial our little grumbles really are.

St Paul said in his letter to the Philippians: "Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable - if anything is excellent or praiseworthy - think about such things ... And the God of peace will be with you." (Phil 4:8-9)

If we can only follow this advice and dwell on the positive things of this world, how much more pleasant life will seem. Having then learnt this art, even when there is a real problem in our life, I am sure we will have more strength to deal with it, for God will give us peace.

Bargains

2011-01-03T19:14:00.002Z

Everybody loves a bargain – half price offer, buy one get one free, 75% off – even though deep down we know that most of the time the bargains are not real: the offer deal is factored into the price, the store/manufacturer makes up the small loss by a large profit elsewhere or the items are ‘end of range’ and the seller just needs to get rid of them. The phenomenon of ‘sales fever’ is well known: people will buy almost anything In the heat of the moment, battling through a scrimmage of dozens of other people to reach the ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ bargain, and the items will often languish unworn in a wardrobe or unused at the back of a cupboard when in the cold light of day, and in the peace of one’s own home, we see that they were not such ‘bargains’ after all.

It is quite different with something we are given by a friend, or a service rendered: most people’s first reaction is ‘But you must let me pay you for it’ or ‘How much do I owe you?’ We are strangely reluctant to accept something for nothing from our friends, we do not like ‘to be beholden’ to anyone we know personally.

Perhaps this explains why people find it so hard to take God up on His offer: redemption is ours if we only say ‘yes’. We cannot earn it or deserve it; the only response asked of us is to accept thankfully and wholly the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ on the cross and the grace of God. Does this seem too easy? Actually, it isn’t. There is something in human beings that doesn’t like to surrender control, that likes to say, ’I did this, I deserve this, I achieved this by my own merit/effort’ and it is very difficult to accept this huge gift of grace as being wholly out of our own grasping. However, once we accept that grace is ours by God’s bounty and not by our own efforts, we come to accept also that we are ‘beholden’ to God for everything else, too – for the very world we live in, for our bodies, our talents, our relationships with others, our ability to overcome adverse circumstances and the fact that we can rejoice in the Lord at all times.

Just say ‘yes’ and ‘thank you’ and learn the wonderful promises that God has made to all who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and accept his suffering as being on behalf of each and every one of us.

A Look at the Life of Jesus

2010-10-19T19:18:00.000+01:00

I would expect even most non-Christians to be aware of why Jesus died – to conquer death, to save us from our sins, to bring forgiveness, to bring salvation, to redeem the world. But how often do we ask ourselves why Jesus lived? Was his life simply a pathway to the cross – he had to live before he could die? Or was his life as important as his death?

There are so many different pictures of Jesus in the New Testament: the Jesus of the synoptic gospels is a lot more ‘human’ than in John’s: and Paul’s hardly refers to the life of Jesus at all. There is a further picture of him that we need to consider and that is what we call ‘the historical Jesus’.

Many people would start from a different point: the question whether Jesus was a historical figure at all or a myth? By asking the question of the title, we are starting from the assumption that he was a figure of history: we don’t question that because if we do, we question the very basis of our professed faith. If Christianity is not rooted in history, then it is simply a cult like so many others and has nothing to say to us.

The Incarnation was the second most dramatic of the occasions when God acted in history (the first was the creation) But we have to remember that God chose a particular time in which and a particular people among whom to manifest himself as the baby in Bethlehem. We must not think of Jesus as being a sort of changeling, an alien in human form somehow separated from the people he was born into: we must always think of him as a man of his time and place as well as an eternal being, in the same sort of way as we know him to be both fully man and fully God. So one question we do need to think about is: what was Jesus to his own people, what was his message to them in particular?

Primarily, he was a Jew of his time and place, a product of the culture he was born into. He studied and prayed at the synagogue, he learned a trade from his father, he took part in the festivals of Judaism, going to the temple in Jerusalem with his parents. When he grew up, he was an itinerant prophet in the tradition of Isaiah, Elijah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah: the fact that he considered himself as such is shown by many of his sayings: ‘A prophet is without honour in his own country’: a prophet cannot die elsewhere but in Jerusalem, Also Matthew 10:41.(‘Anyone who receives a prophet because he is a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward’) and so on. More than that, though, he sees himself as the last of the line. He was by no means the first to see himself as the Messiah – the Maccabees, for instance, claimed this role for themselves, claiming that they would rid Israel of the hated Romans – and so did many others, but always with a warlike, nationalistic emphasis, and many of them ended up on the Roman crosses, so in this he was in no way unique. The violent nationalism favoured by other would-be Messiahs was part of the reason, Jesus says, for the continuing ‘exile’ of Israel from the kingdom of God. Jesus is saying, give up your old way of being Israel, your nationalistic and political aims, and trust me, listen to me. (Part of his acceptance was the paying of taxes to the Romans Matthew 17:24 and ‘render unto Caesar’) He saw himself as the one who would bring the new kingdom, the new Israel, into being.

One aspect of Jesus’ preaching that was immediately different was the feeling of urgency: many of the prophets had an urgency but it is much more pronounced in Jesus’ words – ‘the kingdom is at hand’, things are happening now: and this is emphasised also in his actions and timings: the Last Supper, of course, echoes the Passover in Egypt when the Israelites were told that they had to be ready to leave at any moment:

‘And thus you shall eat it: with a belt on your waist, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. So you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord’s passover’. (Exodus12:11)

Jesus went from village to village in the countryside, mostly avoiding the towns apart from Jericho and Jerusalem (we never hear of him in Tiberias or Sepphoia) telling stories that tapped into the Jewish life story since the Exodus; he told the same stories over and over again, will have used many of the same phrases to get his point across. He spoke in synagogues, in fields, in private houses, wherever he had an audience. He did not come from a rich family, and again in the tradition of prophets he lodged with other people, he was fed and cared for by the villagers where he went (the family in Bethany is a prime example; Peter’s mother another.) He gathered a small group of men around him, to learn from him, to follow his example and to inherit his cloak – like Elijah with Elisha, like John the Baptist. It was not unusual for a prophet to have disciples who would also look after him – remember that the disciples go off to look for food while Jesus waits at the well in Samaria?

The Jewish understanding at the time of Jesus was that the ‘kingdom of God’ would be a new way of living in the space-time universe. The dead were to be brought back to life in this world: starting on the Mount of Olives, which is why most devout Jews want to be buried as near there as possible even today. The phrase ‘repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand’ has little meaning unless it is heard as the climax to a story; a story of waiting – at last, here is the kingdom we have been expecting and it is near!!. There must also have been an expectation of what the kingdom meant. As far as first century Judaism was concerned, this was very much an earthly kingdom: if Pilate still ruled in Jerusalem, if Israel was not observing the Torah ‘properly’ (whatever that meant), if the pagans had not been defeated and were not coming to Zion to learn, then the kingdom was not here. So as long as the Romans were in control, the Messiah could not have come. When the ‘exile’ was over and the God of Israel became her king, it would mean the restoration of the house of David and of the Temple and the overthrowing of earthly enemies such as the Romans, Babylonians and so on. God would rule Israel and Israel would lead the world: the Gentiles were always included in the kingdom of God as is made clear in phrases such as ‘the king over all the earth’ and the promise to Abraham that ‘all nations would be blessed’ through him, though this would be through Israel. This kingdom would be the world as creation was meant to be from the beginning. The miracles of stilling the waves and the loaves and fishes have this resonance, that all creation, which fell with man, will be restored and under the rule of God. They did not see it in any way as the end of our universe or anything to do with life after death in a place called ‘heaven’, it was firmly fixed in the here and now of the future, if you see what I mean. The story of Israel was expected to come to a climax in the space-time universe, they had no feeling of the end-of-the-world-as-we-know it. It was a this-worldly redemption that they sought and expected. They would triumph over their enemies, by which they meant the Romans and the Babylonians, the Egyptians and the Assyrians.

Furthermore, in Jewish thought, repentance did not have the solely or even primarily individual moral response that we tend to give it: it was far more the returning of Israel to her God. The call to repentance was understood historically (e.g. Josephus) as meaning a renunciation of the nationalistic violence which was so much a part of these centuries. I think this is shown quite clearly in the gospels, particularly in the Matthew 11:20-24 passage, ‘woe to you, Chorazin’, and to the Jonah story of Nineveh where the repentance was national, decreed by the king to divert punishment from the city. As far as individual repentance goes, the stories Jesus told were of a lost sheep sought out by the shepherd, a lost coin hunted for by the woman: the initiative is with God and we can only repent within this framework of God’s love. This is foreshadowed in the OT where we are told that the children will no longer suffer for the fathers’ sins but each will suffer for his own. (Jeremiah 31:30/Ezekiel). The aim of repentance was the Jewish national restoration and follows the lead of Jeremiah, Amos and John the Baptist among others. Those who refused to listen to the message were threatened over and over again with national disaster, not personal – they would be carried away into Babylon, scattered among the nations and so on.

The teaching of Jesus was throughout teaching a new way of being Israel, a way that would overturn so many of these historical ways of thought. For a start, he chose for himself twelve apostles, who represent the new tribes of Israel: it is these twelve who will rule in heaven. This adopting of disciples was also typical of the older prophets (Elijah, John the Baptist and others) but in this case these twelve were to be the nucleus of a new way of being Israel, a restored Israel. The story Jesus was telling was still the story of Israel, of her turning away from her God. Jesus lived as one of them, he was not an outsider imposed upon them by God: their salvation comes from within their own community, their own history, but he has come to change their way of thinking and to make them question their ideas and traditions. Cf Jeremiah ‘their leader will be one of their own; their ruler will arise from among them’ (Jeremiah 30:21) Also Moses (see Acts 3:22-23: ‘For Moses said, ‘the Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own people; you must listen to everything he tells you. Anyone who does not listen to him will be completely cut off from among his people’.)

Also, the call to ‘repent and believe’ which Jesus, and John before him, was bringing to the people was more of a corporate, national turning away from the fight against the oppressors towards God, and a call for trust in and loyalty to Jesus and the new way he was showing them. It was not understood as a call simply for individuals to ‘repent’ of their sins in an inward, ‘religious’ way and in some vague way ‘believe in’ something ‘out there’. It was a definite call to the nation to renounce their rebellion against the authority of the Romans and to trust in what Jesus was teaching them. The exorcisms that Jesus performs are to show that, contrary to the old way of thinking, the enemy of Israel is not Rome or any other warrior nation: the enemy is Satan and it is Satan’s trick to mislead them into identifying where the threat really lies. Furthermore, says Satan, if your enemy is the Roman military and political machine, then you have to defeat it by military and political means. Jesus is saying that this is not the way. Once they realise that Satan is the enemy, they will also realise that there must be a different way of overcoming him since armed rebellion will not achieve this. The way to do this was the way shown in the Sermon on the Mount, the way of love, turning the other cheek, going the second mile, being salt and light to the world. If you understood, you could cope with the message, it was not for a half-understood word to set alight the tempers of the time. Jesus’ aim was not the overthrow of the Romans or the restoration of the sovereignty of Israel, rather it was the restoration of the sovereignty of God over Israel.

Just as the prophets of ancient times often acted out their message, Jesus told stories to get his message across: but his stories were ‘the same but different’. He told stories that the country people would recognise but somehow the message came out different from what they were expecting. The Saviour would not drive their physical enemies away. What is more, in Jewish thought of the time, a rich man was blessed by God, reaping a reward for his good deeds: and here is Jesus saying that the rich will find it really hard to get to heaven, that the rich young man should give all he has to the poor if he wants to follow Jesus. This is why the apostles ask, ‘If the rich cannot get in, who can? His emphasis on shared meals did the same thing, showing that the sinners and outcasts must be brought into the community, not exiled as Israel has been exiled from her God. Jesus was demonstrating living by the spirit of the law and not the letter, offering a new heart (which was certainly needed) and the call to follow him to the Cross rather than others to rebellion. Each of the things he taught was in its way another summons to repentance, a turning away from the old ways, an aspect of what Israel must be if the exile is to come to an end. His healings, too, showed how creation was meant to be perfect:: his stilling of the storm and the waves shows that creation will also be healed in the new world. In fact, when Peter walks on the water himself, this also is a breaking-in of the new order into the old world: he fails because he cannot yet conceive of the possibilities open, he is still ruled by the laws of physics and ‘common sense’ of this world. But if he could walk on the water at all, so could we all if we could accept Jesus’ world as the true one. After all, a miracle is not the breaking of earth’s laws but the re-establishment of God’s kingdom law. God does not impose his will on us, we are free to act as we wish, but as soon as we ask him in, he can act

Jesus also demonstrated a new way of being human: his relationship with his God was something unusual in the Jewish story. Theirs was a very ritualistic religion, with 613 laws in Leviticus, with ritual prayers for almost every moment of their lives, for bathing and washing in special ways and at special times, for fasting and feasting. But on the whole this took place in the synagogue or in the family situation. The idea of going up into the mountains to spend half the night in prayer was typical of the prophets but not of the general populace. But although he brought the same message of repentance and judgement, he had a far more compassionate outlook than some of the older ones. His new way of being Israel is demonstrated, as we said, in the healings and the shared meals, the mixing with sinners and outcasts, the questioning of the rigid rules of the Pharisees and scribes.

What was so scandalous to the Jewish authorities was that Jesus, and John before him, were saying that this repentance did not involve going to the Temple and making sacrifices: anyone could participate by going into the wilderness and being baptised in the Jordan. This was a huge affront and challenge to the Temple leaders and a ground-shaking thought to the people themselves who had had it drummed into them over their whole lives that God’s forgiveness for the nation and themselves was bound up in Temple ritual and sacrifice. There are places where Jesus specifically indicates that he is the replacement for the Temple: in his overturning of the tables when what he does causes the suspension of the sacrifices, a foretaste of the time when the Temple will be destroyed and no more sacrifices will take place; and again in the Last Supper when he makes it clear that he is now the sacrifice and the replacement for the Temple worship. The fact that the meal is at Passover time again stresses his message of urgency, as it was urgent on that long-ago night in Egypt that the people ready themselves to leave.

These are windows opening onto a new world, the world where the lion shall lie down with the lamb, but in this space-time, not somewhere else. The blind are given their sight, lepers healed, the lame walk….

God is the creator: therefore he has already worked in history. Jesus is therefore another step on the way: he is rooted in history so that when the kingdom comes it will also be an historical development, not some magical Narnia. This rooting in history is what makes Jesus and the God of Israel different from the pagan gods who tended to be active in a limited geographical area and outside our concept of time.

I don’t think Jesus was expecting a total revolution of the nation: rather, like the yeast of one of his similes, he wanted groups of people in their own communities. There were many sects: the followers of the Pharisees, the Essenes, the followers of John the Baptist, the Zealots and many others: Jesus did not expect all these to suddenly change: but he wanted groups that would live this new life and gradually influence those around them, so that the new Israel would grow steadily out of the old, in much the same way as our cell system ought to be working. He came ‘to bring life in all its fullness’ – this can only be found in a community which has real and loving relationships with one another and with God, it is not an after-life thing but a now-thing. All this, again, indicates that he was not expecting an imminent end of the space-time world. It was a long-term strategy. By the same token he was not intending to found ‘a new religion’: but when Israel as a whole rejected him, these new groups of his (cf Acts 2, the 3000 from all over who would go home and spread the word) went out to work on a wider field.

There are passages which sound as if Jesus is expecting the ‘end of the world’ to happen very soon and it has been suggested that he was disappointed in this. But there are far more passages, including those aspects I have just mentioned, where his aim is quite clearly to build a new community: and that takes time. He came, as I said, to show a new way of being Israel, and if that meant turning everything they knew on its head, so be it. And this new Israel is, of course, what we now call the Church.

Philadelphia

2010-10-07T18:22:00.000+01:00

The city of brotherly love.

Philadelphia lay twenty eight miles south east of Sardis. It was not particularly ancient, being founded in 140 BC but there had from earliest times been a settlement on the site. It was a very strategic site, as the borders of three countries – Mysia, Lydia and Phrygia – met here, so it had the characteristics of a border town.

It was the gateway to the East and commanded the great highway which led from Europe, so it was the gateway from one continent to another (bearing in mind the different cultures on each side).

Philadelphia was built by Attalus with the deliberate intention of making it a missionary city. Beyond lay the wilds of Phyrgia and the barbarians and the function of the city was to spread the Greek language, way of life and basic Greek civilisation throughout the regions. Sardis had had a similar function in relation to the peoples of Lydia and had done so well that the Lydians had almost forgotten their own language and followed the Greek way almost completely. But the Phrygians were more stubborn and had refused to take on the ways of the foreigners. So its mission had been to bring to the barbarians all things Greek.

The city also lay on the edge of a great volcanic area. This, as is obvious still today in places like Italy and Sicily, is very fertile ground and this area was a great grape-growing area. It was also an area rich in hot springs and people came to bathe in the waters for healing. So while Philadelphia’s produce went out to the ends of the earth, people came from all directions to seek for health and healing.

However, as well as prosperity the volcano brought danger again as it still does today. It was an area of earthquakes and in AD17, when Sardis was also destroyed as we said last week, Philadelphia was laid waste: but Tiberius treated it with the same generosity as Sardis. In gratitude for benefits conferred, the city changed its name to the New Town of Caesar. The name did not last and the old name came to the fore once again (like St Petersburg/Stalingrad in our time). Names are important and do change – in the same way as a monk or a nun takes a new name when they join the order, but it can give an unsettled feeling if the new name is not right.

The citizens of the city therefore in several ways led rather an uncertain life. When the frequent earth tremors came, the people left the city and camped out in the open to escape from the falling masonry and stones which the shock brought. So in a fearful state the people were always coming out and going back, fleeing and returning. So fear and flight became part of the rhythm of their lives.

It was also a famous centre of heathen worship: Dionysius, the god of wine, being the principal deity as you might expect in an area famous for its vines. There were however so many temples to so many gods that she was often called Little Athens. Do you remember that in one of the cities – Smyrna? – we said that a person who had served the state well would be shown on the coinage with a laurel wreath on his head? Here someone like that – who had been a magistrate or a public benefactor or a priest – would be honoured by having his name inscribed on one of the pillars supporting the temple, so all who came to see and worship might see and remember.

Chapter 3:7-13

Once again, in this passage, there is no ‘nevertheless’ but this time it is because it is unalloyed praise. This is not because there is no challenge – there is a synagogue of Satan, so presumably, though not explicit, slander and possible persecution here too, but the people have held true through everything.

1. V1: Holy and true: there are two Greek words meaning ‘true’, one meaning a statement that is not false and the other meaning real or genuine as opposed to illusory. This is the one used here. Jesus is the one person who is real and genuine – you may think you find happiness or joy elsewhere but it will be an illusion: the only true happiness is in Jesus.

2. What is different about this introduction? It is so far the only introduction which is NOT an echo of chapter one: there we had the keys of death and Hades, but not these words that we have here.

3. ‘The Key of David’ is a reference to Isaiah 22.22: ‘(He will be father to those who live in Jerusalem and to the house of Judah). I will place on (Eliakim’s) shoulder the key to the house of David; what he opens no-one can shut, and what he shuts, no-one can open’. Only through Eliakim, the steward, could anyone gain admittance to the royal palace and the king’s presence: in the same way, only through Jesus can we approach the presence of God.

4. v8: I have placed before you an open door: there are a number of ways this can be interpreted. Also, note once more that ‘Jesus knows’.

a) ‘the door of opportunity’: Philadelphia had been founded as a missionary city, to take the Greek culture to the wilds. Now it can be a missionary city for Christianity. It was the doorway to virgin territory for preaching the gospel of Christ. We are being told that there is an opportunity for each of us to share the word of God where we are. Also we have the opportunity to increase our own knowledge, to study the Bible, to pray, to learn so we may serve both God and our fellow-men.

b) There was a large Jewish population in Philadelphia. Those Jews who converted would have the synagogue door shut in their faces. Christ is saying, but my door is open to you.

c) Jesus described himself, in John 10:7-9, as ‘the door’ (NIV ‘gate’). In these times, a sheepfold did not have a gate, just a gap in the fence, and the shepherd slept across the gap so the sheep could only get in or out through him. Jesus is that doorway.

d) It could be the doorway of prayer, which leads us into the throne room of God and which can never be shut.

e) It could refer ahead to the doorway in chapter 4:1, the doorway to heaven standing open, which again is through the blood of Jesus.

5. V8 – kept my word and not denied my name: we have seen before that we have to hold fast and remain faithful, and this is what Jesus is praising the people for.

6. v9: we talked before about the synagogue of Satan and how Jesus is defending the Jewish nation by saying these people may call themselves Jews but they behave in a way which means that they cannot be accepted as such; in effect, they are lying. But they will be overcome and the people of Christ will triumph. Those who now try and persecute them will come to see, and have to acknowledge, now or in the after-life, that their victims were the beloved of Christ.

7. These people have been obedient and have held fast. Their reward will be to be kept from the trial that everyone else on earth will have to go through, the day of judgement. Isn’t that amazing? They alone are held safe because they have proved themselves. Does this mean that all who are faithful will avoid the time of trial?

8. I am coming soon. In Chapter one John said that people should read the prophecy because these things must soon take place and because the time is near. For each one of us the time is near, irrespective of the time of the Second Coming. Our lives are the blink of an eye in the scale of history, let alone of eternity. Jesus is coming soon for each and every one who holds fast to him. The people of the city have won their victor’s crown and must keep the faith so that it cannot be taken from them. They can lose it but it cannot be taken from them except through their own weakness or infidelity.

9. We have again the individual responsibility t overcome, which is clear in each letter of the seven. The phrase, ‘a pillar in the temple’: We have seen that a priest or a servant of the people who had excelled in some way would have his name inscribed on a special pillar in the heathen temple. A pillar helps to support the structure, so if we hold true and we use our strength and thought and effort to build up the church, we are pillars in ourselves, in the temple of God. We help to support Christ’s church here on earth.

10. ‘Never again will he leave it’. Again, we can see how the history of the city, the instability of earthquakes which led them to flee regularly, would make this a very potent saying for the people. Finally, they will have total security in the place where they dwell, because they will be on the bedrock of Jesus. Bedrock does not move. Their faith will keep them safe.

11. ‘new name’: The heathen worthies had their name inscribed on a supporting pillar: we are told that we can be the pillar and on that will be inscribed the name of God, and the name of the new Jerusalem, and also ‘my new name’. The people of Pergamos were told that they would receive a white stone with a new name on it: now Jesus is saying that it will be HIS new name that will be written. Perhaps Jesus is his name as Man, the Christ is a title, the Son is a description, the Word is a function – perhaps there is a new holy God-name that we will learn. Isn’t that exciting? If you think about it, when a monarch succeeds to the throne, they issue their own currency – coins and notes and stamps – with their picture and their name on it: archaeologists would have had a difficult time if this were not the custom. So perhaps this is Jesus saying that he is the king and we are stamped with his name as a sign that we are symbols of his reign, proof of his reign, owned by him (give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s: if we are stamped with the name of God, we are God’s)???

Summary: So you see how all through the letter, we see how Christ talks to the people of the city in language and pictures that are meaningful to them through their history, through everyday events, through civic practices – and out of all these he wove the message from heaven. ‘How to use here and now to get there and then.’ The city stood firm as a last bastion against the rising tide of Islam on her borders.

.Today still it is a Christian city with a Christian bishop: it held fast and kept the faith.

Psalm 84

2010-09-29T17:42:00.000+01:00

The psalm opens with a heartfelt cry about the beauty of God’s house. We know God cannot be contained in a house – Solomon says as much – but being human we need a place where we can go to meet with God: and that is a place of beauty by virtue of its being God’s house. This is not only a physical beauty but a spiritual one, it is a place lovely to come to with all that it offers and promises. For the psalmist, apparently David, it is a positive yearning – some people go to church as a duty or because they are coerced, but to the psalmist it is a true desire, as one desires to be in the company of the one one loves. In the courts of the Lord will be other worshippers, there will be the atmosphere conducive to prayer and reflection as well as worship, and above all there will be the nearness of the living God. His heart and his flesh cry out – it is a physical longing as well as an emotional one. Perhaps his breath comes short at the thought, perhaps his body longs for the peace of the time of prayer spent in the temple: as we are told to love the Lord God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, so this is what is inclining the psalmist to the courts of the Lord.

He compares this longing to a home-coming, as a bird has a nest. The sparrow reminds us of the NT, how Jesus tells us that not a sparrow falls without God’s knowledge. The sparrow is a small domestic bird, part of our everyday lives, almost unnoticed most of the time. The swallow builds her nest for her children, as God made this world for his children. She is a rarer visitor, watched for and appreciated, a sign in our country at least of the summer’s approach. The birds are able to nest beside the very altar of God, they can remain there day and night, and rear their young in that safety, as we can take our children to the safety of God’s house. Again we are reminded how Jesus said that foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head. The birds can nest within the holy building and will not be turned away; the psalmist wants the same freedom to come and go as the birds have.

In these early verses, there is the repetition of the name of God: here it is ‘Lord God Almighty’ but in the authorised version it is ‘the Lord of hosts’. This is a reminder that God is with David even when he is with the army in the field. God has his own armies. Then he says, ‘my king and my God’: while God is the king, no harm can come to his subjects as long as they are obedient. Again we have NT echoes, ‘My Lord and my God’ says Thomas to Jesus. The double possessive, the repetition of ‘my’ shows how David clings to the Lord: to my mind it suggests joyful acknowledgement of submission and an assurance of safety.

Blessed are those who dwell in your house: there are the priests and Levites and we know from the OT that devout Jews also stayed there: Anna (Luke 2:36-37) and Simeon, Eli and Samuel (1 Samuel 3:2-ff) lived in the temple always and spent their time in contemplation and praise of God. The psalmist – I don’t know if it was David but it could well be - envies them this privilege. There would be those who came to clean the temple, those whose work brought them regularly to that place as of right and custom: they were set apart from the hustle and bustle of the world outside and familiar with the sacred things – this was their life and must have seemed very peaceful and holy compared with his life fighting.

Another favoured group, in David’s opinion, comprises ‘those whose strength is in you’, that is, those who draw their strength from God and do not simply rely on their own human resources. Also, those who have set their heart on pilgrimage: this can encompass both those on a physical pilgrimage, visiting the holy places – perhaps coming from afar to the temple for the prescribed festivals and feasts or in our day those who visit the Holy Land to tread the very earth that Jesus trod; and those on a spiritual pilgrimage, whose hearts are involved in the journey with God, who study his word, fulfil his commandments, who strive wholeheartedly to draw closer to God, to honour him and bring him praise.

The Valley of Baca was an arid place, a valley on the way to Jerusalem and stands of course for all those wilderness times when either our physical life or our spiritual life seems dry and pointless, a thing of habit only: but the pilgrims coming to worship the Lord make it a ‘place of springs’ (or in the NKJ ‘make it a well’). The valley is a place of tears, of trials and sterility: there may be things growing but they will be tough and scarce. (Things that grow in barren hearts also tend to toughness). Tears are salty, and salt makes ground unproductive and barren. But it becomes a place of springs or a well: springs carries with it the idea of bubbling, of freshness, clean clear water running and chuckling over stones. A well is more a place of company and sociability: the well at the centre of the village is where people gather to exchange news and become a community as well as a source of water: so whichever translation you use, it is a place of life and laughter, even if just an oasis in a forbidding landscape. There is a line in one of my favourite books, the Little Prince by Antoine St Exupery, which says that what makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well. It is a reflection of the way God sees, ‘with the heart’. You don’t even need to see the well, or the spring, to have that sense of anticipation, of relief available, of rest and refreshment. It is all part of seeing without having to use one’s eyes, maybe as God sees us: we can ‘see’ the invisible. Water can be smelt from quite far away, bringing a promise of relief and quenching of thirst. No wonder Jesus uses the analogy of ‘living water’ for the Holy Spirit. These pilgrims create a place like that, a place where the rain of God’s mercy will fall (remember Shakespeare’s Portia, ‘mercy falling like the gentle dew from heaven’.) The rain from above and the waters from below mean life, a good harvest, even a measure of abundance in the word ‘pools’ – not a drop, not a puddle, but a pool of water, promise of God’s plenty. But let’s also remember the words ‘they make it’ – the spring or well had to be dug from the earth as Abraham dug the wells for his flocks: Christians do not expect everything to come from God with no effort on their part – we talked about this in the ‘Power is in the Command’ session, where even those being healed had to make some effort, even if only to stretch out a hand or to go and bathe in the Jordan. But with a heart for God and a willingness to put in some hard work, the Christians can transform the most unlikely places into somewhere where others can come and rest and be refreshed. Having done this, they ‘go from strength to strength till they appear before God’: once they have set out on this path, God will strengthen them and help them to develop their spiritual muscles; as it says in Philippians 1:6 – ‘Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ’. Once God has started with us, he will finish the work, we will grow from strength to strength, able to do God’s work, able to bring life and joy to dry places, to replace tears with fresh potable water, to create a resting place for other travellers on the road. After their work, the people were not tired, their strength increased. The aim is to appear before God – not all the gathering together or even working together will be worth anything unless the final aim is to come before God.

There is a call to God in the next verse: the psalmist was praying that he might be in the house of God, among those blessed ones. He calls to the Lord God Almighty, another translation for the Lord of hosts, an echo of verse 3: the Lord of hosts has angels at this command, the God of Jacob recalls the promises made to the patriarchs, Jacob wrestling with the angel: the psalmist will not cease, will not let go, till he has received the blessing he asks for from God.

The NIV says, ‘look upon our shield, O God’: the NKJ says ‘behold, O God our shield’. I am not a Hebrew scholar, but I find it easier to understand God as our shield; unless prayer is being seen as the shield and this is what God is being asked to look upon: answer my prayer, O lord my God. Look upon your anointed – an echo to us of Jesus Christ, the anointed one of God: our safety is sure in Jesus. David was the anointed king and was asking for God’s favour on himself. Each of us in her own way is the anointed of God – we are told in Psalm 23 that he anoints our head with oil. This prayer was for David but each of us can use it for ourselves without any changes.

Better is one day in your courts than thousand elsewhere: no worldly pleasure, certainly nothing Satan can offer us, is equal to a moment with God. A thousand years here on earth, striving for money and power and pleasure, is time wasted against one day with God. Also we have echoes of Paul’s saying in Romans 8:18: ‘For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us’. However awful life here may be, however persecuted God’s people, the time will be as the blink of an eye against eternity with God. A glimpse of God, a moment with him, and both earthly joys and sufferings will be as nothing.

I would rather be a doorkeeper: to be on the threshold of God’s house is better than being outside, to have the most menial position. Yet is it a menial position? There are those who go straight into the church, deep inside, perhaps forgetting those still outside the door. There are people who are seeking the door but have not found it: there are people who have turned their back and are running away. It is possible to be too deep within the church, you can stay there too long, and forget the days when maybe we were not too sure either.

The doorkeeper is in a unique position: he knows what is going on inside, he has the privilege of being able to enter, but he chooses to remain on the threshold where he is in a position to call to those passing by, to encourage them also to enter the house of God, to put their hand on the latch and open the door for them. He can temporarily take their burdens – their shopping bags, their briefcases, even perhaps their children – and look after them while the other ventures in to see what is happening inside. He can hear the worship and the prayers and join in in his heart, while watching over the village or town or city from his place at the door. He can shut out the noise and bustle of the place to allow the rest and peace within or he can open the doors to the world to welcome in all comers. It is a privileged position, not a menial one. Being in this position is better than being in the ‘tents of the wicked’, the fleshpots, in the midst of plenty, but the fact that these are tents as against the house of God implies their frailty, their impermanence.

For the Lord is a sun and shield: we need the sun in a practical way, to ripen the harvest, to being joy to our souls, to warm us on earth; we need the Sun of Righteousness in Jesus Christ for our only righteousness comes from him: but we also need a shield both from the sun itself (as anyone who has been out at midday in the Spanish central regions will know!) and from the dangers on the road as we walk with God. it was one of his earliest promises to Abraham – Genesis 15:1: Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield and thy exceeding great reward. A shield can protect our heart, lungs and other vital organs: it can be held higher to protect our head. In Ephesians 6:16 we are told that the with shield of faith ‘you shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.’ Whatever comes against us, if God is our shield it will not be able to touch us anywhere important, it will glance off and fall harmlessly to the ground.

The Lord bestows favour and honour: but he bestows it where he will, as to Moses he said: ‘I will have compassion where I will have compassion and will have mercy where I will have mercy’. it is not for us to query God’s favour, where it falls. But he will not withhold it from ‘those whose walk is blameless’ – we know that he will give us ‘more than we can ask for or imagine’, we know that his provision is abundant, that in the measure we give we will be given ‘full measure, pressed down and running over’. (Luke 6:38: ‘Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over…For with the same measure that you measure it shall be measured to you again’. If we obey God’s laws, in the spirit and not just the letter, we will receive God’s blessing. In Exodus the Israelites were told to choose death or to choose life: if we choose life, God will not leave us wanting.

And David ends with a cry of certainty, there is no doubt in his mind; that whoever places their total trust in the Lord will receive blessing. This blessing is not available to the person who says all the right things without worship and love in his heart, without trusting God in every aspect of his life: but if we place our lives in God’s hands, like a child with his parent, then God’s blessing will be ours.

Acts 6

2010-09-22T18:09:00.001+01:00

It is easy to think that Christianity sprung fully-fledged from Pentecost, but this is not so. The word did not appear until some time later in Antioch when it was first used to describe the followers of Jesus (Christiani) and certainly the apostles thought of themselves as Jews albeit Jews who had who had seen the Messiah. In Jewish life of the first century, ‘the daily distribution’ of food and provision for the needy was a very important feature. The Jews more than any other nation had a real sense of responsibility for the less fortunate; as we see in God’s word, over and over again they were told to help the widows and orphans, the poor and needy and they took this seriously. Two synagogue officials, who were known as the ‘receivers of alms’, went round the market and private houses every Friday morning (the day of preparation for the Sabbath) and made a collection for the needy, which would be partly in cash and partly in goods. This was distributed later in the day; those who were facing only temporary difficulties received enough to carry on, those who were unable to support themselves on a permanent basis received enough for food for fourteen meals – 2 a day for the week. There was also a house-to-house collection made daily for those whose need was really dire. The followers of Jesus had clearly adopted a similar approach in providing for those who had fallen upon hard times, as we are told that those who had lands and goods sold them and brought their money to the feet of the apostles for distribution: but it was not a departure from the old ways, more a variation on the theme in that everyone came together to partake.

However, among the Jews themselves there were what we might call two tribes: Luke would not have had to spell out what the situation was as it would have been familiar to most of his readers at the time. The orthodox really hated and despised the Gentiles and all their ways – they referred to them as ‘dogs’ and would have nothing to do with them. These tended to be the ‘homeland’ Jews from Jerusalem and Palestine, who spoke Aramaic and prided themselves on the purity of their race, (if someone ‘marries out’ in orthodox circles even today, the family ‘sit kadish’ ie mourning and treat them as dead), no foreign marriages or foreign blood for them. The others were the Jews of the Pentecost revelation; many of those who were converted at Pentecost stayed on and became part of the new community, but they had been dispersed for generations, and as we learnt from Acts 2, had come from all parts of the known world; most of them had no knowledge any longer of Aramaic or of Hebrew and were, as we discussed in our away-day, Greek-speaking. This led to the Aramaic-speakers looking snobbishly down on the Greek-speakers whom they basically despised as little better than the Gentiles. It was inevitable, perhaps, that this should be reflected in the daily distribution of offerings and it is very possible that the widows of the Greek-speakers were indeed and purposely neglected.

The apostles felt that it was not their calling to sort out this sort of problem: theirs was to pray and preach and spread the word. In the authorised version it says, ‘it is not reason that we should leave the word of God.’ To the apostles, the most important thing was the preaching of the word and logic, or reason, showed them that if they failed in this task which had been given to them, the new life would come to nothing. Prayer and the word were of paramount importance in the early church, as they should always be but unfortunately have not always been in the church’s history, and the people recognise this, ‘the saying pleased the whole multitude’. No-one thinks that there are more important things for the apostles to be doing, so it also means ‘this is not a good enough reason for us….’ I think nowadays we so often think that our personal problem is the pastor’s first care, it is up to him to sort it out for us and if it takes him away from his duties of prayer and preaching, so what, they can wait. The early church realised that the apostles’ way of life was the lynchpin of their community and so ‘reason’ dictates that they should continue in that work. So the seven were appointed to take over the purely practical details of daily life. They were chosen by the people, not imposed from above but coming out of the body of the church by common consent, and the apostles prayed for them and laid hands on them before they started work. So often we have people who volunteer for some task and plunge straight in, in their independence, rather than awaiting the anointing from the eldership, and then we are surprised if things don’t turn out as we had hoped. These seven were called to practical service, not to preach (except by their actions). It was their calling to become the ‘organisation’, if you like, the ‘government’ of the new community because however high one’s ideals, it is impossible for a large number of people to live together without someone willing to make and implement decisions. The authorised talks about them ‘serving tables’, the NIV ‘waiting at tables’: both service and waiting are what God wants of us: serving each other in love and waiting upon God’s guidance in whatever field we are called to.

The seven were chosen by the whole group of disciples who were looking for ‘men of honest report (good reputation) full of the Holy Spirit and of wisdom’. We actually hear very little of any of the others apart from Philip but their election was very important for the church. It is interesting to note that, despite the prejudice between the two groups, all the seven were from the Greek section, judging by their names, and yet presumably they were to be in charge of both groups of people. Perhaps this gives us a lesson in prejudice – it shows that whereas we can inveigh against a generality – ‘I hate the Germans, the Romanians are thieves and gypsies’: excuse me, what about Ben and Maria? Well, they’re an exception. No, they’re not: it’s just that we know them as individuals and then we see them for who they are, not for what they represent. The Aramaic speakers were not only willing to accept the Greek overseers, despite the fact that they came from the ‘despised’ peoples, because they knew them for themselves and that they were men of God, but were part of the election process and pleased with the result. The appointment of these men was part of the building of the new Israel, which we have discussed previously. Hitherto the Jews had seen themselves as the Chosen Ones, by which they meant that God had chosen them to be special, to rule, eventually to instruct the Gentiles in the way of the Lord and they understood that the way that ‘all nations would be blessed’ through them would be that they would lead the way to a knowledge of God and his Law. (Some actually thought that God had created the Gentiles to fuel the fires of hell and many believed that the Gentiles were destined to be their servants). What they now have to learn is that the Jews were indeed chosen by God but to serve and to bring all nations into the same relationship with God that they enjoyed themselves, not as inferiors but as equals. This, as we said before, was one of the attractions of Christianity to the Gentiles, that it did away with the hierarchy of Judaism and said that all people were equal in the sight of God: not equal as we try to make it these days, that everyone should be the same, but equal in that, despite their differences of skill, ability, talents, intelligence, gender, nationality, age, or anything else, all were accepted by God in exactly the same way. Jesus died for all of them regardless of who they were. None of the seven has a Jewish name, all names are Greek and one, Nicolaos, had converted to Judaism, but they are Jews, and they are showing the path of service which the Jews who profess to follow Jesus need to take. In fact, although looked down upon as second-class Jews by the Jerusalem lot, they are seen as being the ones for the job, and demonstrating what the true ‘way of being Israel’ is meant to be.

And, indeed, we are told that this decision to delegate practical matters to others was shown to be the right decision. At the beginning of the passage ‘the number of the disciples was multiplied’ – the church was growing at a great pace – but now, once a solution had been agreed for the problem that arose, ‘the word of God increased….the number of the disciples multiplied greatly….and a great company of the priests were obedient to the faith’. It was doing well to start with, despite a few hiccups along the way, but once the people had been able to come together, to agree a plan and to choose people to carry it out, having them blessed and anointed by the apostles for their work, the ultimate aim of it all was even more successful, reaching right into the heart of the Jewish temple in that the priests too were converted. When we live in harmony, when we can approach difficulties in unity, seriously seeking the way forward and asking God’s blessing upon it, his miracles will multiply and his church will grow. There will always be times of dissension, of differing opinions and human reactions, but we must not let these obscure the central point which is the promulgation of the word of God: as long as that is our main thrust, we can resolve the differences and move forward in greater power than ever under God and the Holy Spirit.

The Power is in the Command

2010-09-01T18:54:00.000+01:00

The first words spoken in the bible are a command: ‘Let there be light’. The result was immediate – ‘and there was light’ or a more direct translation, ‘and the light was.’ The light did not have any power to create itself: the power to create the light was in the command itself, as it was in all the subsequent creation commands. God did not have to do anything, he didn’t form the stars out of plasticine or the animals out of pipe cleaners. The command contained the power of creation, the Word, or indeed the very breath of God, created as it was spoken, and we find this in numerous other places throughout the Bible. We mostly forget how very powerful words are even when spoken by us mortals. Think of writers like Tolkien or Milton: they create an entire world with their words, a world which is complete within its own terms. We can make someone’s day or ruin it by the things we say. If this is true of us, how much more powerful the words of the Almighty, of his Son or of his messengers.

The most common command in the bible is ‘Fear not..’ When a messenger angel of the Lord appears, your first reaction will be one of fear. Daniel, John on Patmos and others fell down on their face before the visitor. Fear of the unknown, fear of the majesty, fear of what it might portend; but the first words the angel says are always these: ‘fear not.’ And from what we are told in the different stories, once again the power to banish fear is in the command itself. Daniel, Zacharias, Mary, all were able then to listen and understand what was going on, fear no longer ruled over them and dulled their minds. We have talked about fear before, and shown how it can rule us, how it steals our ability to think sanely, to muddle our minds, among other things.

One point to note is that those issuing the commands are those with the authority to do so – God, his messenger, his Son. I think this is proved by the verse where the devil says: Jesus I know and Paul I know, but who are you? He is saying, Your commands have neither the authority nor therefore the power to rule me.

Jesus had the authority and this is shown over and over again, particularly in his healings. He tells the paralytic to ‘take up your mat and walk.’ The paralytic himself has no power to do so, he cannot make his muscles and joints and nerves do the necessary things and his brain has accepted the fact that this is the case: but the command possesses the power. We have the option to disobey, to say, ‘No, I can’t’: the paralytic could have said this and remained as he was. After all, God gave us free will and that includes the possibility of rejecting his gifts; but Jesus’ command holds the power which obedience can use. The same thing is true of the man with the withered arm, told to stretch it out in front of him: of himself, he was unable, but the power was in the command. Had there been a second man in the crowd who also had a withered arm, but to whom Jesus had not been talking, would he have had the power also to move his arm and find it healed? We know from certain episodes that power physically left Jesus when he healed so I don’t think his power just disseminated itself among all who were standing around: it had to be focussed. Therefore I suspect not. It is an individual thing: the command is to me personally, even if it is a command to a large number: for instance in an army, the order to ‘March’ is for everyone but also for each one or there would be chaos. So the command is for me and the power is given to me.

Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is full of instruction as to the life they should be leading now that they have been led out of the darkness into the light. One of his commands is that they should ‘be strong in the Lord and the power of his might’. We might say, how can I be strong in the Lord? How can I live this sort of life that Paul is telling me about? Again, the power is implicit in, is contained in, the command itself. We can be strong in the Lord by obeying the command to be strong! If we trust the power of his might, we will find the strength that we need. Paul has the delegated authority to issue these commands and the power is not in Paul but in the command itself.

When the children of Israel were in the desert, fractious like small children despite all that they had seen God do for them up to that point, and complaining of thirst, the Lord told Moses to strike the rock. Moses was an intelligent man, who would have known that you could go around striking rocks till doomsday and the chances of water gushing out would be minimal if not non-existent: but in the command is the power to draw the water from the rock. As with Paul, the power is not in Moses, it is in the command. If Moses had not chosen to obey, the water would not have come forth. There are two sides to the event: the command from the authority and the effort called for from us. The water was not given without some effort, however small, on Moses’ part: the paralytic was not healed where he lay, he had to obey the order to ‘Take up your mat and walk’: he had to make the effort for the healing to take place, as was the case with the woman doubled over who was told to ‘Stand up’. To the people themselves these things must have sounded impossible: for how many years had they been unable to do these things?

An example similar to the creation examples happens when the disciples are out in the boat in the storm and fearing for their lives, and Jesus with a simple command bids the wind and the waves be quiet. He had the authority to do this and the power to still the storm was in his words of command.

Joshua was told several times to ‘be strong and courageous’ He obeyed the command, he did not allow the circumstances and the responsibility to overcome him but immediately obeyed the order to go across the

Jordan

into the promised land. The Lord said Joshua was to lead the people out, he was to be strong and courageous, then he says, ‘The you will be prosperous and successful. Have I not commanded you?’ Joshua does not hesitate for one moment, he accepts the command and the power that goes with it: ‘So Joshua ordered the officers of the people: go through the camp and tell the people get your supplies ready. Three days from now you will cross the

Jordan

here to go in and take possession of the land the Lord your God is giving you for your own’.

We are so prone to saying, ‘I can’t’. If God says we can, we can. The power to obey each of the ten commandments is in the commandment itself but we refuse to believe it or we choose quite deliberately to turn away. Jesus managed to obey all of them, after all! We hear people say of an adulterous affair, ‘we couldn’t help it: it was too strong for us’ but God’s power is stronger than anything. Go to the word of God and hear his command to you and you will be given the power to obey and to carry out the command. Leaving the commands among the pages of a closed book will not do the trick, it must live in your mind. We are happy to keep God’s promises in the forefront of our thoughts but less happy to keep the commands there! We talked in one session about sin and about how all the evil thoughts come from our heart: murder, dishonesty, covetousness, they all come from anger, greed, lust, jealousy, the 7 deadly sins that can kill your soul. Man’s sinfulness causes him to be deaf to the commands that could save his life, and therefore the power cannot reach him.

(This leads me to a slight digression because when I was thinking about this, on top of having recently studied the 23^rd psalm, it came to me that what we are being told, over and over again and in so many different ways, is that we have to conquer desire for anything except for God. In Psalm 23 we had both ‘I shall not want’ and ‘my cup runneth over’ and I suggested that both of these phrases included the concept of being like Paul, content with what God chooses to give us rather than what we think we want. The 7 deadly sins and their consequences tell us the same story: greed, envy, jealousy and lust are quite obviously connected with wanting: pride, anger and sloth less so in concrete terms but still as regards position, thwarted ambition and other things, there is still a connection. Sins such as murder, cheating lying are mostly to do with wanting what we have not got. The Ten Commandments are to do with the same thing: if we do not desire, we will not make idols of things other than God, we will not lie and murder, we will not commit adultery or covet what we do not possess, we would have no reason to give false witness against our neighbour; and we are more likely not to misuse the name of the Lord, not to profane the Sabbath, more likely to honour our parents So the approach to holiness, to hungering and thirsting only for God, comes in the death of desire, the lack of wanting. We have to kill within ourselves the desire for anything other than what God has given us: from this comes the vow of poverty taken by those who give their lives to God wholly, like St Francis and his followers and those of other orders. It is comparatively easy if you are an anchorite, a hermit or an ascetic isolated from the world but far harder when you are living and working in a normal environment. I don’t think that I am saying that desire is sinful in itself, though perhaps it is, simply that it separates us from God. Only when the things of this world mean nothing to us can we truly approach God and see him face to face. While we are discussing the ten commandments I would also like to make a couple of other points. Although above, I said that the power to obey the ten commandments lies in the commands themselves, at the same time I am not sure they are simply commands as such: We are so used to hearing them described as commandments and so many translations say ‘do not’..in the imperative form, that that is how we think of them. I mentioned once before that if you look at them, they are inviting us to a position of respect: respect for God, for his name, for his Sabbath, for truth, for our parents, for other people’s possessions, for life itself, for fidelity to our marriage vows and so on. Furthermore, in the King James translation, it does not say, you may not or you must not, it says, you shall not. We discussed recently that ‘you shall’ has the same emphasis as ‘I will’ – ie it is a matter of will, a determination, a having-made-up-one’s-mind to. The French translation I have uses a simple future tense: the Italian has imperatives for the Sabbath and one’s parents, the Spanish has more imperatives. The Hebrew bible says ‘you shall covet – not’ etc! I think what it is saying in fact is that, if I am your God and you are my people, you will have no desire to do any of these things: they are not simply being forbidden but shown as displeasing to God and therefore they should be displeasing to us and we should refrain from doing them. And as a final statement, I would say that when we read these, we read ‘God said: Thou shalt not’ and it is though we are talking to other people. If we turn it around and say, I will not…’ it suddenly becomes closer to home and shows how it is my personal responsibility to turn away from these things.

Anyway, back to the power In the command. There are instances, especially in the Book of Acts, where the apostles themselves are given the delegated authority to give these commands. Peter and John heal the beggar at the Beautiful Gate, saying to him ‘In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk’. Peter heals Aeneas in Lydda, who has been bedridden for eight years: he says to him, ‘Aeneas, Jesus Christ makes thee whole: arise and make thy bed. And he rose immediately.’ (Acts 9:34)

There were of course healings and miracles where no words were spoken – when Paul brings back to life the young man in Troas for example, and during the time of Jesus himself, when the woman touches his garment and is healed by the touch. But there are many many instances where the command gives the power.

In fact, to me this whole thesis is more or less proven by the one incident on the sea of Galilee; Peter sees Jesus walking on the water and says to him: Lord, if it be thou, bid me come to thee on the water. And Jesus said, ‘Come’ and Peter got down from the ship and walked on the water. He did not simply decide to go and step out of the boat on his own initiative, he knew that this would only be possible if Jesus were to command him to do so: and yet he also had to make the physical effort to leave the safety of the boat and risk this strange new practice of water-walking! But when he became conscious of the wind and the waves, he suddenly thought, ‘I can’t’ and at that moment he began to sink and was saved only by Jesus’ strong arm. If we allow doubt into our hearts and minds, we cannot obey the command but that does not mean that the power was not there. It was, but we refused it as we may refuse any of God’s blessings and gifts.

If we can see it so clearly in these examples, why do we find it so difficult to believe when we are told to ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind, all your strength and all your soul’ or to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’.? God does not command us to do anything that is beyond our power: that would be foolish, like telling a five-year-old to climb Everest. If a command is given that it is impossible to obey, it is not the fault of the apparently ‘disobedient’ one, it is the fault of the one issuing the command as is clear in the army or in a school or a parliament. But God’s power lies in the command and nothing can stand against that. Again, we can refuse. We can put other idols before God and give our love to them instead, we can decide that because we don’t like someone, we are certainly not going to love them, thank you very much! But that is our pride: we don’t want to give the gift of love where we think it is not deserved and won’t be appreciated. We don’t deserve to be loved by God, but he loves us all the same and keeps telling us so. Perhaps there are times when God doesn’t like us very much either but he never withdraws his love. We may misbehave, go our own disobedient way, be he never withdraws his love. The power to love even those whom we dislike lies in the acceptance of the command, in our obedience. If we obey, God’s power will make it happen. I think, too, of the episode where he is sending out his followers and tells them that, if they go to a village that does not accept them, they are to take back their peace as they leave: the power that lay in the benediction is removed from the place that did not welcome them. When we reject the command, the power is withdrawn. Had the paralytic not risen then but had been taken home, I don’t think he could have decided a week later to have a go. The power will not remain if we refuse it. We are so prone to saying ‘I can’t’: stop saying this, stop thinking of your paralysis or all the practical reasons against success, and listen to the Lord.

We talk about God equipping us to do what he wants us to do: there is a saying that he does not send out the equipped, he equips the sent-out. This is exactly the same sort of thing: if he gives us a command, he gives us the power to obey – if we choose to do so. He is not unreasonable. (The sent-out could have refused to go in which case the equipping would have been withheld). So if we come across a command that seems impossible, we must simply do as we are told without allowing our conscious mind to find objections, and the Word will transmit the power to us. If God tells us to go and preach in the market place, he will enable us to do it: if he tells us to love our enemies, he will enable us to do it. If he tells us to leave our nets and follow him, he will enable us to do it. If he tells us to walk on the water, he will enable us to do it. If he tells us not to fret about tomorrow, what we shall eat or what shall we wear, he gives us the power to cease fretting and to trust in him for all that we need. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you.

So, hold on to God’s promises which are for you but also hold on to the commands, because obedience is what God asks of us first and foremost, and if we do not know what he is commanding us to do we cannot obey. Never be afraid of a command, that it will demand more than you can give, because, as I have been showing, God will never ask that of you: he will demand what is needed and provide whatever you are lacking in order to obey.

Psalm 19

2010-08-19T07:27:00.002+01:00

This beautiful poem is ascribed to David, though there is no real evidence that he did write it. What I am giving is in parts very much a Christian appreciation, but for the Jews much would still hold true though without the reference to Jesus. It opens with an unexpected attribute of the heavens – we think of the sky as just ‘being there’; beautiful or threatening, but not normally as having a voice. This is almost a shout of triumph; the words ‘proclaim’ and ‘declare’ are words of authority: we proclaim a king, we declare in a formal situation – the Declaration of Human Rights, for instance, the Declaration of Independence. The heavens don’t mumble or illustrate or even just impart, it is far more positive than that, far more majestic. It is a statement carrying weight, it is a statement of power, a public expression of something important.

It reminds us that even if man does not sing God’s praises, the very stones will rise up to do so. Here, the very heavens are speaking. It is an example of Hebrew parallelism, where the same thought is expressed in two different ways in subsequent lines. The glory of God IS the work of his hands. When we talk of the glories of the sky, many people think instinctively of the night sky with the stars shining: but the daytime sky can paint amazing pictures in blues and whites, greys and reds, oranges and hints of green. Even my son in his teenage years would often call out, ‘Mum, look at the sky!’ because he was so struck by its beauty. Sunset and sunrise are obvious times, or when a storm is brewing: one of my favourites is when there is a steel-grey sky and a shaft of golden sunlight breaking through. There are those who say this is just a cosmic accident, an interplay of ‘natural’ forces with nothing significant behind it: but to those children of God it is another reminder of his creative skill, his power, his faithfulness to us. The work of his hands must also include the air we breathe, the rain and dew which come from the heavens and without which we could not survive, part of his abundant provision for our good.

The rhythm of day into night, night into day, takes us back to Genesis chapter one: ‘and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night’. And there was evening and there was morning….’ Everything in our world dances to a rhythm – day and night, seasons of the year, flowering and fruiting, birth and death: it’s like Ecclesiastes 3 ‘there is a time for every purpose under heaven’. It shows us the faithfulness of God, that the morning never fails, that night follows day and day follows night. We are told that the heavens ‘pour forth speech….they display knowledge.’ God gave us the stars for ‘signs to mark seasons and days and years’ and this they do continually and faithfully. We peoples of the earth speak different languages and often have difficulty understanding one another – we have difficulty sometimes understanding one another when we are using the same language! – but when we look at the heavens, they speak to everyone in his own language of God’s goodness and faithfulness and care for us, or he would not have provided the lights. We are reminded of Isaiah 45:7 where we are told: ‘I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things’. In our human world, light would have no meaning without darkness, prosperity can only be recognised against its opposite, so all things are in the hand of God. The word used in Hebrew that we have here translated as ‘pour forth’ speech is a word that means pouring forth constantly and abundantly like a fountain or a waterfall. The knowledge of God is poured unceasingly from the skies, there is never a time when it shuts down to take a rest. In the King James the wording is ‘day unto day…night unto night’ which suggests that each day and night transmits new knowledge gained, new information to be spread about in an active and continuous way, not just a passive display like an old TV test card but a learning and imparting. By day and by night, we receive this flood of information about God, his goodness, his faithfulness, his creative power. And it is always new, not just a repetition hour after hour of the same thing but an endless new teaching of the presence and power of God. I am always reminded of Romans 1:19-21 ‘since what may be known about God is plain (to them) because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God, nor gave thanks to him…’ But the voices of the heavens and the skies are also saying ‘he who has ears, let him hear’. Not everyone will hear the voice of the heavens, as not everyone responded to the call of Jesus or understood his parables.

In Romans 10:18. Paul quotes these lines as a prophecy predicting the spread through the globe of the Gospel of Christ. God ordained that the light of the gospel should be shed wherever the light of the heavens shone and that it would be as useful and as beneficent, from a moral point of view, as the light of the sun and the stars is in the natural world. All the people of the earth, every single individual one, shall benefit from the gospel as they benefit from the light of sun, moon and stars. We are told that ‘Jesus is the true light that lighteth every man that comes into the world’, not just those who listen to his message. By means of the bible and through missionaries that word is carried throughout the earth.

Verse 4 leads into the second section of this psalm. God has made a tabernacle, a tent, for the sun which is the centre of our universe, served in dance by all other heavenly bodies – the planets, the stars, the smaller suns. He is like a general in his command tent, and his troop leaders take their orders from him: in fact those people who thought that the world stayed still and the sun moved around it could have learned from this psalm: for no other planet or star is given a home, a fixed dwelling place. It is the influence of the sun that gives light, heat, motion and activity to all the other bodies.

The sun comes forth from his tent ‘like a bridegroom….like a champion rejoicing.’ The sun in the heavens is an emblem of the Sun of righteousness, the Bridegroom of the church, and the Light of the world, casting divine light and salvation by his gospel to all the nations of the earth. And without sunlight there would be no life on this planet. The sun does not weary and nor does Christ as he calls his church into being and growth. Not much grows without the light of the sun and the church cannot grow without the light of the gospel. In the same way as the whole earth is lit by the sun, so it is lit by the message of Jesus. But also by using the metaphor of the bridegroom (and I think the picture here is of the bridegroom stepping out from under the canopy that is used at Jewish weddings, to join in the celebrations) and the champion ‘rejoicing to run his course’ it is a reminder to us that every day is a new adventure, a new beginning and a new challenge, and that we should rejoice in it, not wake up thinking, oh dear, not another dreary day. And as the sun rises in one place and travels to its setting, so we should make the most of all our day; and as nothing is hidden from its heat, so nothing – not our thoughts and desires or actions – is hidden from God’s knowledge .

Verse 7 introduces us to a more solemn section. The connection, I think, is that the sun is obeying God’s law in its circuits (as we talked about the laws of nature when discussing miracles). But we are reminded that, far more important to us and beneficial is the law that God has given us. In the early church it was sometimes thought that there were three separate manifestations of God’s law: natural law seen in creation, the law of Moses written in stone and the law of grace, written in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. Certainly the law can be taken to mean doctrine or anything that teaches us the truth about God. It is perfection in itself – how can it be other when it comes from God? – but it also demands an approach to perfection in us: we cannot be made perfect except through the law of God. It revives our soul which has gone astray in sinfulness and disobedience; when we turn back to God and accept his law, our soul is renewed, we are made clean, we are made perfect as our father in heaven is perfect. It is like the phrase in psalm 23, ‘he restoreth my soul’.

God’s testimony is the witness between God and man in which he sets out what he requires of man and what he will do for man when these conditions are fulfilled. This testimony is sure, to be fully trusted and depended on: the ignorant and unlearned, by believing what God has said, become ‘wise unto salvation’. We are told several times that God gave his message to the simple, made things clear to them while hiding things from the wise. The simple can also mean ‘single minded’ – those whose heart is set on finding God, not forever trying to find answers to questions but simply seeking the Lord.

The statutes of the Lord – those things he appointed to man, his stewardship, his responsibilities - are right, just as they should be, and if obeyed, will lead to a rightness for man; and as with anything that is ‘just right’ they cause the heart to leap, to rejoice. There is a ‘fitness of things’ whether in a landscape, in a piece of music, a poem, a friendship, that you cannot always pin down or describe but which does indeed cause you joy. When there is no shadow of doubt, no question as to their value, God’s statutes will rejoice our hearts.

The commandments of the Lord are pure, holy, just, and good They are the means which the Holy Spirit uses in to bring us to a sight and sense of our sin and misery, and direct us towards our duty to God. There are things that we are commanded to do and things that we are commanded not to do; but as we have talked about before, these are not arbitrary rules that God decided upon to make our lives difficult: they are for our protection, for mutual respect between people and between us and God. the King James says they are ‘pure’, the NIV ‘radiant’: either way, they are like clear light to our feet, they shine, there is no adulteration, they open our eyes to our relationship with God, to his love for us.

The fear of the Lord is a phrase we have all heard. It does not mean being afraid of, it means veneration, it means obedience, it means aspiring to godliness and holiness in ourselves. The fear of the Lord will cleanse us of our sin so that we will become clean and bright as the heavens; purified like silver, purging away all things that defile us, making us spotless before the Lord. It endures for ever because without it, we are lost. We are told that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: it teaches us that we can do nothing without him. It keeps clean that which God has purified, it saves us from going astray.

The ordinances (KJ: Judgements) of the Lord. God has given his laws, his ordinances, and these are what he will judge by on the Last Day. This encompasses all his regulations, his decisions, his announcements as to what is right and proper. These things are sure (or true): there is no doubt about any of them, they will not mislead. In the Book of Revelation, the angel says ‘These words are trustworthy and true’. They will not change as God does not change: what he has said is forever, he will not change his mind with every wind that blows; you always know where you are with him in this respect. They are also righteous: they lead us into a right relationship with God and hold us there.

Gold was as much prized in the ancient world as it is today, and honey was the sweetest thing they had before man learned to refine sugar from beet and cane. (Bushmen have always had a weakness for honey and were expert in finding bees’ nests in trees or old trunks and would take all sorts of risks to get the honeycomb). Honey straight from the honeycomb has a richness of flavour that is lost once it is exposed for long to the air. Gold is hidden in the ground and achieved only with great effort but gold is only for the body and the eyes of the body – we are warned in other places of the ‘lust of the eyes’ that long for the material things around us: but the laws and commandments of God are of far greater value to us, of a lasting value; gold is only of value in this space/time universe of ours, we cannot take it with us when we go. God’s grace is the gold of the soul and will be with us for eternity. If we receive God’s word with faith, it will be sweeter than honey to our soul, more precious than gold. We can never have a surfeit. I don’t know about you but when I see something like the Crown jewels and there is so much gold, such huge sceptres and orbs and tableware, it looks almost cheap and nasty, certainly in bulk like that to any but the greatest miser it seems ridiculous that we set such store by it, it cannot satisfy the hole in our heart, but God’s words will never cause ‘indigestion’, will never tarnish but will always satisfy that longing within us.

As I said before, God’s word is for our benefit: he is a righteous God and just: he warns us over and over again of what will happen if we disobey him, if we stray, and only after all these warnings does he punish: in the same way, he tells what the rewards will be and he never goes back on his word. Obey his laws and the rewards will come. But the reward is not only in the things God gives us and does for us, but that feeling in our heart, that rejoicing, because we are safe in the will and purpose of God.

Who can know his errors? The underlying message is – I can’t. Without the law, as Paul said, he would not have known that it was wrong to covet. Without the Holy Spirit we do not understand our sinfulness and how it separates us from God. I always found it comforting that in the law there were differing rules for those sins committed on purpose and those committed by accident or without the knowledge that they were sinful. We are not always aware of what constitutes a sin and it is only the Holy Spirit who can convict us of our wrongdoing. We are also, as we have said before, very good at hiding things from ourselves, not consciously but our subconscious takes over and simply removes something from our upper mind. There are faults we know about, faults we genuinely don’t recognise as such and faults we hide from ourselves: but we cannot hide them from God and we need him to show us the truth about ourselves.

The psalmist also asks to be kept from wilful sin: I’m sure we have all at some time done something knowing perfectly well that it was wrong. If we do this, sin will in the end rule over us, it will become harder and harder to resist. Once a line has been crossed, it is easier to continue on in that path. (I have often heard that once someone has, for instance, killed once, it is much easier to do it again!) Accidental sin is one thing, wilful sin is quite another and must be rooted out. God has promised that we will walk blameless before him, but this can only happen when we deny sin any authority over us.

Finally, the psalmist asks God, the Holy Spirit, to watch over his heart and mind. Jesus reminded us that the only uncleanness is what comes out of our heart – murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. (Mt 15:19) If we keep our hearts holy, then our words and meditations will be pleasing to God who is our rock and our redeemer. This ending reinforces our total reliance on God – the rock on which we stand, the only one who can redeem us from sin, the one who sent his only begotten son to die for us and to be raised, to conquer death. In Jewish law, as we find for example in the book of Ruth, there is a phrase, ‘my kinsman redeemer’, one’s nearest relative who had the right to ‘redeem’ the property of someone who died so that it would not pass out of the tribe. God is the ultimate ‘kinsman redeemer’ being our Father who has adopted us as his family; Jesus is our brother who redeemed us with his life.

Pentecost

2010-08-11T18:23:00.002+01:00

We have decided to stay in the Book of Acts and to look at Chapter two, Pentecost and the coming of the Spirit. You may well think that you know this passage so well, what is the point of looking at it again, but we already know that the Word can always offer us something new.

If you were asked to sum up the Book of Acts in a single word, what would that word be? I would say: Evangelism. In Chapter One Jesus tells the apostles that, after the coming of the Spirit, ‘You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth’. Starting locally, where they are now, it will spread to the nearby countryside and then, like ripples in water, will encompass the whole earth. And by the end of the book we are told that ‘For two whole years Paul stayed there (in Rome) in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. Boldly and without let or hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.’ In only thirty years the word has reached the centre of the great Roman empire and is being preached ‘without hindrance.’ In the Greek, the words ‘without let or hindrance’ are just one word and it is a triumphant cry: it is a miracle that God’s word has come so far and so fast and what started as 120 people has now become tens of thousands all over the world.

Pentecost is one of the most important of the Jewish festivals: it commemorates both the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai and it was when the offering was made to God in gratitude for the in-gathered harvest. Also, it was a day when the Law decreed that ‘no regular work’ should be done (Lev 23:21) so it was a holiday and there would be more people in the streets than usual. I tried to think what the special significance was: and I thought maybe it is the day when the Law is not abolished but fulfilled – encapsulated into the two great commandments of love: and also, perhaps God is saying to the apostles: you think you are just starting out but from my position in eternity I can see that the harvest has been safely gathered in. God’s use of tenses is different from ours: remember: ‘whatever you ask for in my name, believe that you have received it and it will be yours’.

Chapter Two begins with all the apostles gathered in one place. Paul told us that the actual translation of the Greek means that they were ‘together together’: they were together physically and geographically but they were also together mentally and emotionally, in prayer and brotherhood. We are all familiar with the picture of the coming of the Spirit – the sound ‘like the blowing of a wind’ and the tongues of fire that settled over the head of each one: the Spirit can come silently if the circumstances demand it but He can also come with sound and fury, and fire is an element frequently associated with him. John the Baptist said, ‘I baptise you with water but after me will come one who…will baptise you with the Holy Spirit and with fire’. (Matthew 3:11) .We are also familiar with the fact that they then began speaking in tongues understood by listeners from all nations. The way Luke writes it almost sounds as if the apostles were speaking foreign languages but in fact almost all Jews, wherever they lived, would speak both Aramaic and Greek, which was a common language throughout the empire. So the speaking is more likely to be what we call ‘speaking in tongues’: but more importantly, the apostles were given a simple message and the language they used was able to reach the hearts of all the hearers: ‘each hears them in his own native language?’ perhaps means that each hears what God needs to say to them individually.

Pentecost was, as I said, one of the great feasts of the Jewish year, and Jews came from all the countries where they were scatted. When they heard the commotion of the apostles all talking at once, these people hurried together to where the centre was. The Jews are very emotional people and very God-fearing: they wanted to know what was going on. God’s timing is always perfect: he knew that these visitors would come from the four corners of the earth and would be going home again: and when they went home they would take with them this great story of what they had seen and heard. We are told that they were ‘Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappodocia, Pontus and Asia, Phyrgia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs’. What a collection of people to see and hear what God was doing in Jerusalem! They knew it was something out of the ordinary, asking each other, ‘what does this mean?’

In verse 13 we have others, though, ‘who made fun of them and said, ‘They have had too much wine’. I have always understood this to mean that there are some people who will always be completely deaf to the Word of God, who will hear only meaningless noise when the Gospel is preached, who will mock the messengers and who are only interested in hearing their own voices. Peter rebutted and indeed ridiculed the suggestion of drunkenness, not because for one minute he was taking them seriously, but in order to prevent anyone else from doing so, anyone who might be influenced. It is amazing how mockers can draw others to their side, because people don’t want to seem ‘goody goody’ or ‘holier than thou’: they will deny what they really feel and join in the mocking, the teasing, the disrespect towards something precious. Peter is determined that this will not happen. Peter’s sermon echoes Jesus’ words of Chapter One: he starts close to home with ‘Fellow Jews and all who live in Jerusalem’ and later moves on to the wider ‘men of Israel’. At this stage his message was only for the Israelites, it was only the episode with Cornelius later that indicated that the word would move outwards to the Gentiles.

Preaching in the early church could be categorised into four areas: there was ‘kerugma’ which means a ‘herald’s announcement’ – a simple retelling of indisputable facts: the next one is didache, which is the answer to ‘so what?’ ie gives explanation of meaning and relevance of those facts: there was paraklesis which is exhortation: it urges men to the duty of living their lives in a way to match the teaching they have been given: and there was homilia, which was the treatment of any aspect of life in the light of the Gospel message. Peter’s first sermon is of the first type – a simple giving of the facts of Jesus’ life and death. He is showing the people that what is happening is not some strange unexpected occurrence but was foretold a long time ago by Joel. The Israelites were brought up with a close knowledge of the Scriptures (which of course in those days meant the Old Testament alone) and this was the route through which the gospel message was brought to them. It was proving that the prophecies came to fulfilment in Jesus that was the major argument, not his teaching or even his healing, and Peter starts the evangelising with this very fact. The way of preaching, which told the audience a story that they already knew, is very familiar to us. It is true of Stephen before the Sanhedrin, among others: he summarised the whole history of God’s work in Israel to plead his case. In this case Peter rehearses the story of Jesus with his signs and miracles. What does Peter tell the listeners in this speech that is not already well known to them all? He tells them that Jesus did these signs and wonders, that he was put to death on the cross, which would be presumably known to most if not all: although crucifixions were not that rare an occurrence, there was bound to be talk about this particular event, with all the controversy that surrounded it, the denial of the teaching of the Pharisees, Pilate’s washing of his hands, the afternoon of darkness. He tells them that God raised Jesus from the dead, which again would probably have been widely discussed (all this had happened, remember, only 7 weeks before and the visitors would undoubtedly have picked up a lot of chatter and gossip: especially when we remember that the guards of the tomb were told to spread abroad the story that the disciples had stolen the body: others would have stepped in to deny this story and those who had seen the risen Lord would have been sure to tell everyone they knew.) Peter again refers to the scriptures, to the psalm of David prophesying the resurrection – you will not abandon me to the grave. This could not mean David himself as Peter tells the listeners, for David died like any mortal man and was buried. So what was it that Peter told the people that they may not have realised for themselves? He tells them that all this was done ‘by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge’. The Pharisees and others may have thought that they were acting on their own initiative to get rid of someone they saw as a troublemaker: Satan may have thought he had engineered this situation to frustrate once and for all God’s plan of redemption: but they were all wrong. It was God’s plan from the very beginning and this needs to be made known to everyone listening. God not only permitted the suffering and crucifixion, it was his ‘set purpose’, it was his decision and his alone. (though this is no way lessens the horror of the crime both in human terms and in terms of what sin can do). There have been suggestions that the Cross was a final ‘throw of the dice’ after all other attempts at salvation had failed, or that Jesus went to the Cross to placate a wrathful and vengeful God, but this is not true: it was God’s own loving plan towards his children. God was also the one who raised Christ from the dead and set him at his own right hand but it was Jesus who received the Holy Spirit from his father and then poured it out on the disciples at this moment. It was God who ordained the Son as Lord and Christ. It is worth remembering that without the Resurrection there would have been no Christian church: it was the resurrection which changed them from being bewildered and broken, dreams gone, lives shattered to having the confidence and courage to go out and preach.

Joel’s prophecy also mentions the ‘great and glorious day of the Lord’. The Jews had no doubt that they were God’s chosen people and felt that this meant that they were chosen for special honour and privilege: but their history was one of disaster. Human means would never achieve for them the status they felt they deserved, so it can only come from God. They began to look forward to a day when God would intervene directly in history and exalt them to their rightful place. That day of intervention was The Day of Lord: it divided the present age, one which was evil and doomed to destruction, and the age to come, which would be the golden age of God. the Day of the Lord was the hinge between these two and would bring with it the birth pangs of the new age. It would be sudden: it would shake the world to its foundations: it would be a day of judgement and of terror. By quoting this prophecy, Peter is saying: You have dreamed for generations of the Day of the Lord when God would break into history. Now that day has come, in Jesus.’ Remember when Jesus says to the apostles that men have longed to hear and see what the apostles are now hearing and seeing? One reason why it was so important that the Jews should see Jesus as the subject of the prophecies was to counteract the fact that to them a crucified ‘failed’ messiah was inconceivable – ‘cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree’. The apostles simply had to get over the fact that all this had been foretold before the Jews could possibly believe.

Peter’s boldness came, we know, solely from the Holy Spirit. Before this he was in many ways a brave man – cowards do not go deep-sea fishing so he was physically courageous, he offered to go and die with Jesus and I don’t think that would have been a problem to him. But he was a coward morally, he did not want to risk the ridicule that might come if he confessed to being associated with this apparently ‘failed’ leader, to having been duped into following a false messiah. Perhaps he was afraid of any sympathy that might be his as his dreams are seen to come to such an ignominious end. But the Spirit dealt with him where he needed it and gave him the moral courage and boldness to stand before all these people and declare his allegiance and the message he had to bring. This example must have worked among many of the listeners, and the message itself was a message that so many wanted to hear, that it reached their hearts and they asked what they could do. Peter repeats the message of John the Baptist and of Jesus – repent and be baptised, receive forgiveness of your sins and be blessed with the Holy Spirit. What is so interesting and amazing about repentance is that it not only gives you a new future but changes your past and therefore your present (liberating us from fear and estrangement through our sin and equipping us to fight the battles that will come): and the resurrection changes not only your future but also your present as well. There is a hint even now that the Word is not going to be restricted to the Jews when Peter says, ‘this promise is….for all who are far off – for all whom the Lord our God will call.’ Paul echoes this in his letter to the Ephesians when he says, ‘you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ’ (Eph 2:13). It is clear that even now not everyone was convinced – we are told that ‘those who accepted his message were baptised’ but the inference is that there were others who did not accept what they had heard. God’s word will never reach everyone, whoever the messenger may be; there will always be those who think that they know best, that they will not be taken in by what is going on.

Why was it important that ‘three thousand were added to their number that day’? Don’t forget that these people had come from all over the known world. Yes, they would go back as newsbearers, tellers of tales, discussing what they had seen and heard: but how much better and more useful if they go back as witnesses to the truth, as evangelists in their turn. This is the way that carries conviction – not just idle gossip but a life-changing event.

In these early days there was not a church as we know it. The Church was the believers but they continued to meet in the temple courtyard: they were not hiding away in corners but worshipped openly in the Temple where they would be seen. They shared meals in their own homes and spent their time in prayer and praise. We have discussed the fact of their sharing everything, selling possessions. The two mainstays of this life were attention to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship which is defined as ‘the breaking of bread and prayer’. Meals have always been very important in man’s history: meals to celebrate festivals, meals to acknowledge acceptance (if an Arab offers bread to a guest, that guest can be sure that his life is safe!). Jesus used shared meals as an object lesson to the Pharisees, he would eat with those who were considered outcasts and sinners. In the Book of Revelation, in the letter to Laodicea, Jesus says: ‘Here I am. I stand at the door and knock, If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and him with me.’ Eating together is a bond. So when the early church shared their meals, they were building a community.

Paul from time to time comments that our church cannot expect to see God working unless we take prayer very seriously. That is also illustrated here when, after we have been told that the people came together in breaking of bread and prayer: ‘Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles’. Where there is prayer, there will God manifest himself in signs and wonders. Jesus could not do miracles in his home town because people did not believe that he was anything special – they had seen him grow up amongst them, they knew his family, who was he to set himself up as someone special? But sincere and honest prayer, especially from a body of like-minded people, enables God to work on this earth through men. And this is obvious to everyone, even those who are not part of it. We are told that the converted enjoyed the favour of all the people and that daily the Lord added to their number. The example of their lives drew people in and created the fertile soil that would allow the seed to develop and grow.

There were perhaps six or seven characteristics of the infant church: she was a learning church (v42), she was a church of fellowship, of prayer, of reverence, she was productive of signs and wonders, she was a sharing church, a church of worship, a happy church and a church that people could not help liking. The Greek word used for ‘enjoying the favour of’ is a word that not only means something is good, but that it looks good too – ie it is good both inside and out. Is this a description of our churches?

Acts 5:12-32

2010-08-07T16:28:00.002+01:00

Acts 5:12-16

This passage gives a picture of the young and growing church. As we discussed last week, this was a church that met daily in the courts of the Temple, the house of God. This was a very public place, where everyone could see them. The passage says that ‘no-one else dared join them’ and then almost immediately that more and more people were added: so this can only mean that all those who did not accept Jesus knew that something special was going on, that they had no part in it and that no-one dared to interfere. They were not afraid of the Christians – it says that ‘they were highly regarded by the people’ – but there is a measure of respect and of difference that kept the non-believers apart until such time as they were converted and joined the group. The Christians knew, as we know from chapter four, that what had happened to Peter and John could well happen to them: arrest and facing the Sanhedrin: they had already been threatened through Peter and John that they should not continue to preach in the name of Jesus and the Sanhedrin had the power to act on those threats, but they were determined to demonstrate to all who they believed in and therefore that they believed his power to be greater than that of the Sanhedrin. And the passage shows us that this strategy was very effective. ‘More and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number.’ Isn’t this what we should be striving for still today? That our witness should be so great and so public that men would be drawn to us, to join us under the banner of Jesus Christ? It was a church of results: miraculous signs and wonders were performed. We are told that ‘people brought the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by’. Paul suggested that this is superstition, which is still to be found among the people of the Church today; there is no mention specifically that these people were healed but in the King James it is difficult to say whether ‘they were healed every one’ applies only to those in verse 16 or also those in verse 15. in verse 16, people brought the sick from some distance away, so the word was spreading beyond Jerusalem into the countryside. And if all these people were healed, not by touch or by word but simply by being in the shadow of Peter, they were healed by the ambience, the atmosphere of faith, the authority, the presence of Jesus among his followers.

Acts 5: 17-32

It was inevitable that the Sanhedrin would act again once it was clear that the apostles and others were not going to heed their warnings and desist. The text in the KJ says ‘indignation’, another translation says ‘envy’, the NIV says jealousy. These are all quite different: the first refers to the disobedience to their instructions. The last two to their personal feelings at the popularity of these new leaders. Whichever it was, the result was the same: the were arrested and locked up. God, though, had other ideas. Presumably the arrest had been quite public – the Sadducees would want to discourage other people from joining this new sect – so the first thing that God told them to do when he freed them was that they should go back to the Temple court and continue their preaching. This would seem to many to be foolishness, but they had the courage given to them on the day of Pentecost, they had the Holy Spirit within them. They knew they could be putting themselves in a more difficult position if not in physical danger, but this did not deter them. The one principle of their lives was obedience not to men but to God. They would not ask, ‘is this safe?’ but ‘Is this what God wants of me?’ They were men who knew they had the truth and that men needed this truth. They were witnesses for Christ.

Again, it was inevitable that the Sanhedrin would act. They knew where to find the men because, again, they were not hiding but were openly preaching in the Temple. In a way, it was becoming farcical for the spectators – they are arrested, let go, rearrested, let out by God’s messenger, arrested again: what is the end going to be?

When Peter and the others were before the Sanhedrin it is interesting that one of the things they were confronted with was that they were ‘determined to make us (the court) guilty of this man’s blood’. Peter’s first sermon on Pentecost had made it clear that ‘wicked men’ had put Jesus to death: it was the set purpose and foreknowledge of God’ but still the guilt belonged to those who carried it out. In every sermon, I think, that we have this point is made again and again: that the greatest crime in history has been committed, that the court condemned the Messiah to a criminal’s shameful death on a cross, but always with the reminder that this was God’s glory. Now, too, peter does not stop at their bidding: he repeats it, ‘whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree’. The Jewish religion had that anyone hanged on a tree was cursed and hear was Peter over and over again saying that this was the Promised One. Peter also repeats that their primary responsibility is to obey God and not to obey man. And he again reminds them of the resurrection which was the catalyst for the birth of the early church. The crucifixion had left them scattered and demoralised, facing failure, the very centre of their lives taken away from them after three years of travelling with and being taught by Jesus. The resurrection was the ultimate proof of all that they had been taught, it showed that God was in control of history and that it is not just a haphazard process: that man’s actions cannot halt the work of God. It was the resurrection that gave them the boldness to withstand the Sanhedrin. He also repeats that it is through Jesus that Israel will repent and receive forgiveness for her sins: that she will turn back to God: and he emphasises that they know these things of their own experience, not as hearsay or rumour but as fact: and that the Holy Spirit who descended upon them at Pentecost is the gift of God. All the basic elements of Christianity are in these few words of Peter’s before the court.

The Sadducees were the ones with political ambitions, who were determined not to upset Rome and to retain an element of autonomy in their affairs: the Pharisees were the ‘separated ones’ who had withdrawn from all ordinary men to devote their lives to the keeping of the law in the most minute detail, as Jesus had made clear. They were highly respected for their adherence to their beliefs, to the austerity of their lives: but Gamaliel was more than respected, he was loved. The Pharisees believed that everything is foreseen and yet freedom of choice is given – ie all things are in the hand of God but man is responsible for his actions. Gamaliel was using this: he said that they must be careful that their free will was not in defiance of God’s will. If it were not God’s will, it would come to nothing anyway. The Sanhedrin took notice of this reasoning but still took it upon themselves to have the apostles flogged and again ordered them not to preach in the name of Jesus.

This had just as little effect as last time. The apostles rejoiced that they had been found worthy of suffering for the name of Jesus. This is the strength of the persecuted church though possibly not really appreciated by those of us living in ‘tolerant’ lands. If you can look on your suffering as a blessing, a gift from God, that he has found you worthy to share in some degree in the suffering of Jesus, then you will not be defeated by it. I cannot imagine what it was like being thrown into the arena with lions, being crucified, being used as a torch in Nero’s pleasure gardens: but it is a matter of historical fact that these things did happen and were borne cheerfully, with singing and praises, by the people concerned. As far as the disciples were concerned, they simply continued their preaching and, apart from the arrest of Stephen, this seems to be the last time that the Sanhedrin tried to stop them.

Prayer Day

2010-07-22T18:46:00.002+01:00

The modern world is quite lackadaisical in its manners and ways. We think as long as we are praying, it doesn’t matter whether we are lying in bed or sitting comfortably in an armchair, or in the bath. In some ways, it doesn’t matter: if we were bedridden or crippled, then of course God would expect nothing of us – though many a monk has knelt all night at his prayers despite arthritic knees and needs help to stand again in the morning. I would like to quote, not for the only time, from C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters; ‘One of their poets, Coleridge, has recorded that he did not pray ‘with moving lips and bended knees’ but merely ‘composed his spirit to love’ and indulged ‘a sense of supplication’. That is exactly the sort of prayer we want; and since it bears a superficial resemblance to the prayer of silence as practised by those who are very far advanced in the enemy’s service, clever and lazy patients can be taken in by it for quite a long time At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget, what you must always remember, that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls.’

If Jesus were to appear before us, as he did to the women outside the tomb, in the flesh, visible, would we sit calmly in our seats to worship him? No, we wouldn’t. We would fall on our knees in wonder and adoration and reverence and fear. Yet we come before the throne of God in a most causal way sometimes. Can you honestly say that you feel no different if you are on your knees to pray? I find it gives me a different attitude, I feel far more reverent and supplicatory on my knees, more humble altogether. We are told in the bible to honour God with our bodies as well as with our souls.

In prayer we try to draw nearer to God. If there is a distance, is it on God’s side or on ours? I would say it is on ours, for we are told in the Word that if we draw nearer to God, he will draw nearer to us. If we approach God as Satan did, and as again described in the Screwtape Letters, with an attitude of calling God to account, making him explain himself to us, then we, like him, will suddenly find ourselves at an infinite distance from him, ‘with a suddenness which has given rise to the ridiculous Enemy story that he was forcibly thrown out of heaven’. We are to approach him rather as trying to understand in humility and then God will speak to us.

When we pray in petition, it is very easy for us to become absorbed in the story we are telling to God. We lose ourselves in the cause, in the emotion, and can feel that we have been very prayerful: but if our focus was on the friend, the required healing, the trials, and not on the presence of God, then it wasn’t prayer at all.

Some people try and help themselves by making a mental picture of God or of Jesus. This again can be counterproductive, since you are then focussing on what is in reality an idol. The Christian most difficult to lead astray is the one who can tell the difference between his imagining and the reality, who can say ‘not as I think thou art, but as thou knowest thyself to be’.

In the NT, Jesus tells us that where two or three are gathered together, prayer is more forceful. The place where prayer is at its most powerful is in church. Why should this be? When a church, a place of worship, is defined, is built by men to be the house of God, they are reclaiming a small part of the fallen world for God’s kingdom. This is his dwelling place in our area, his presence is here in a special way (we know he is everywhere but, like with the Temple, this is his focal point, if you like). It is holy ground. Here, prayer is in its natural climate. In a smaller way, wherever we are when we pray, we are temporarily reclaiming that place too for God, wresting it from Satan, and every prayer is a challenge to Satan for this reason among others.

Why do we pray? Why does God not simply do all the things he sees are needed? God will not impose his will on us, we are free to act as we like, in accordance with his pleasure or against it, and this freedom will not be taken away from us. However, when God’s own kingdom is recreated in faith, when prayer is given in faith and trust, God’s kingdom is recreated in this place and his own laws prevail, rather than the laws of the world. In Mark 9:13 Jesus says: If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes’. The prayer creates that kingdom where God can perform what we call miracles. A miracle is not the breaking of laws of the world, but a re-establishment of the kingdom on God.

Also, I used to wonder why we were instructed to pray for people whom we will never know – the people persecuted for God’s sake, the persecutors themselves: after all, God knows who they are and what they need. In the end it came to me that it is to create a web, a network, linking all of God’s people, even those we don’t know, so that the power of God can use our prayer like wires – and wires work both ways, how do we know that we are not receiving a good impulse from the people we pray for?

We are told that we are to be Christ’s presence in this world. In that sense, every prayer is as if it were Christ praying. When we say, as in the Lord’s Prayer, ‘Thy will be done’, it is not a submission to whatever God may impose on us. It is an acknowledgement that we may be mistaken, we may have erred in thinking that Christ would have made this prayer. We have been talking a lot in the Sermon on the Mount about the letter of the law as against the spirit of the law, and in prayer it is the other way around. We may pray for someone on a journey, that they catch a particular train, or for someone to get a job they are after. Our intention in prayer is for the good of that person, and it is possible that the train in question will crash or that the job will be a disaster. We want God to look at our intention, at the sprit of the prayer, and not take us at the letter, which may be the opposite of what we desired. If our words are in error, then ‘thy will be done’ gives God permission, as it were, to change what we have asked for and to grant the good that he has in his gift.

Also in the Sermon on the Mount, we have talked about praying for your enemy and I suggested that this duty imposes on us a responsibility for that person, in the same way as the Chinese say that if you save someone’s life, then you are responsible for him from then on. If you establish a link of responsibility, it is hard to continue to hate someone. When we come before the Lord with a petition for someone else, then we are assuming a certain measure of responsibility and if the Lord then asks, as he does, ‘who shall I send?’, we must be willing to answer, ‘Here I am; send me’. In other words, we must not ask things of the Lord that we are not prepared to carry out for him if he so desires.

In Thessalonians, Paul tells us to pray constantly. This sounds impossible – how can I, when I have so much on my mind? Part of the prayer life is learning to subdue your mind, to catch the random thoughts and deny them. We know when we are at prayer, how often we get sidetracked and led away by other thoughts (I would suggest that this, too, is more likely if we are sitting comfortably!) until we forget the prayer entirely. This happens in other situations, too – at work or when you should be writing a letter or planning a party. If in daily situations we can learn to discipline our thoughts and focus them on the job in hand, and if we can do it in prayer too and keep the focus on God, then at any time of day when we turn our thoughts to God, they will stay there. The ‘Jesus prayer’ is very useful at odd times of day or night: Lord Jesus, Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. The name of Jesus is at the heart, and when we pronounce it we affirm the reality of the incarnation, the truth that the historical figure of Jesus was God who was made man, was crucified, died and is risen. By calling him the Christ we affirm that he fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament and is the promised Messiah and at the same time it implies that we accept the history of the OT as being the truth of God. But this profession of faith is not enough, even the demons believed and trembled at the name of Jesus. We have affirmed the lordship, the reality and the divinity of Jesus and now we have to approach him in the right state of mind, ‘have mercy on me, a sinner’. The Greek word for mercy comes from the same root as the word for an olive tree and its oil, which is an image which recurs frequently in the OT and the New. Noah’s dove, the bird of peace, brought an olive leaf back to the ark: mankind was saved by the mercy of God and here is the proof that the world was not destroyed. In the parable of the good Samaritan, olive oil was used for healing. The plea ‘have mercy’ is not just a plea that we escape punishment, it is a plea for love.

The simple repetition of this prayer, without even moving the lips, can work a transformation: more than any other prayer it brings us to stand in God’s presence aware only of the miracle of our being able to stand there before him, because in the use of this prayer there is no-one and nothing but God and us. It is therefore both an act of worship and a focus that can keep our attention on the presence of God.

What of the times when we feel it is impossible to pray, when we don’t feel God’s presence, when we are arid and shrivelled up inside? Do we stop, because any prayer would be mere form, mere repetition, and wait for the good times to come again? But how will we know the good times are returned if we have lost the habit of going to God? Wherever there is prayer, there is the HS, even if the prayer is formulaic and uninspired. We must continue to pray, knowing in our head if not our heart, at that moment, that we do believe, that we are saved, we must pray as an act of will. God sees into our heart, he will accept these prayers as happily as any others, because he knows what it is costing us. God does not change, he is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. We may feel unworthy to pray, but this is a temptation of the devil, to draw us away from God. We are purified by the very act of prayer, we are, as I said before, reclaiming a small part of the world for God. Satan really wants us not to pray.

We think we know who God is: what he is. That he is just and merciful, that he is love and light, that he is the healer and provider, the creator and sustainer. When we are in prayer and we think God is not there, it is possible that he is there but we do not recognise him, because we are looking for a particular manifestation but he is showing us a different aspect of his greatness. We may think he is silent when in fact we are talking so much that he cannot get a word in edgeways. Sometimes when people pray, they forget that God already knows everything and they go into the long history of what and when and why – talking more to the others in the room, setting the scene: but God already knows these things and the others usually don’t need to know the history, just that there is need for prayer now, for a particular family or a particular situation. Jesus says in the Sermon, ‘when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words’. We need to be focused on what is important and leave space for God to speak to us, too.

Veronica already knows how I feel about different sorts of prayer, but you lot say you

don’t mind my repeating myself, so here goes. I see prayer like light (I keep coming

back to light: you may or may not remember that I said love was like a white light made

up of the spectrum of colours which were all the elements of love – service, forgiveness,

feeding etc etc). Anyway: so prayer is like light. It can be like sunlight, which spreads

wide and covers half the earth at a time: under this we can gather together all the people

and things we want to include in our prayer, but it is necessarily spread more thinly. Or

we can use prayer like a laser beam, a really concentrated focussed light which has

incredible power. For that, everyone in the prayer group has to have their mind set on

the same thing, must really want to pray this person or happening over, must be beyond

being distracted at that time. Then and only then do I sometimes think you can almost

see the prayer rising to God like the smoke from a fire, it is so powerful that you can

almost touch it. I was therefore very interested to come across this in Amy Carmichael’s

book: I have never before found someone who said what I had been thinking on this

matter:

‘As we went on continually asking that the ways of prayer might be opened to us, we

learned that the kind of intercession that is like a musical chord, every note in harmony

with every other, and all seeking to be tuned perfectly to the keynote (the will of our

Great Intercessor) is something worth guarding at any cost. There is an uplifting

influence in such prayer together……..we ask to be led by the Holy Spirit from point to

point, each prayer leading on from the preceding prayer till the particular subject laid on

our hearts has been dealt with……This way of prayer is just the opposite to the

kaleidoscope kind, which darts hither and thither all over the earth or over a number of

scattered interests (often within the limits of a single long prayer) leaving the mind which

has tried to follow perhaps dazzled, perhaps tired…..(The first kind) is possible only

when all who are praying together do thoroughly understand one another….’

Lastly, we tend to think of prayer as mainly petitionary or interecessory – but, as we have tried to do in our cell group, sometimes prayer must simply be a hymn of praise to the creator, glorifying and exalting his name, without asking for anything for ourselves; praise and worship like he receives from the angels. Even silence is prayer if your mind is open to God. And then, perhaps, we will hear him, the still small voice.

Building the new Israel

2010-07-14T17:39:00.000+01:00

This session is about the early church and its spread through the then-known world. Last week I found a passage in 1 Chronicles 16:19-22 which seemed to me perfect for this:

‘When they were but few in number, few indeed and strangers in the land, they wandered from nation to nation, from one kingdom to another. He allowed no man to oppress them: for their sake he rebuked kings: Do not touch my anointed ones; do my prophets no harm’. This seemed to me a perfect description of the early evangelists.

We mentioned this morning that Jesus was born at a particular time and in a particular place. It is true to say that, had he been born fifty years earlier, the gospel of Jesus would not have been able to spread as it did: so God’s perfect timing is obvious. Three main influences came to their aid: the Roman influence, the influence of Jewry and that of the Greeks. Fifty years previously, the whole of the known Roman world was in turmoil, with civil wars and disturbances of all kinds. But by the time Mary gave birth in Bethlehem, things had really settled down. The pax romana, or Roman peace, was firmly established under Augustus, with garrisons around all the borders of the huge empire and safety within those borders. This led to a great feeling of gratitude among all the peoples of the empire who could now enjoy a time of peace. Augustus also paid great attention to the new network of roads, built and maintained primarily to facilitate troop movements for military and policing reasons and dissemination of news from one end of the empire to the other, but which also made travel much easier for everyone else. This led to increased trade and therefore increased social interaction between people of different nations and cultures. The Christian evangelists made good use of these road systems – in fact, it is not going too far to say that they could only have carried out their amazing journeys at this time: from the time of the fall of the Roman empire until well after the middle ages, such journeys would have been difficult and hazardous.

Jewry had already spread widely throughout Asia Minor and the Mediterranean basin, as we see from Acts Chapter 2: ‘There were ‘Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism), Cretans and Arabs.’ Wherever they went they took their religion with them and they were avid converters: Jesus once mentions that the Pharisees ‘will go to the ends of the earth to make one covert’. In earlier times, Jews had soldiered for Julius Caesar and in gratitude he had allowed them great privileges which had not been abrogated; they could carry out their religious customs without fear, they had their own senate in many of the large towns of the empire and because they brought prosperity to many areas by their trading, they were left very much alone in financial matters too.

The mainstay of their religion was, and is, the Bible. Many non-Jews also enjoyed attending services in synagogues where there was reading, singing and prayer, a far more satisfying worship than happened in many of the Roman and Greek temples, and therefore the influence was already spreading.

The Greek influence was also huge. By this time Greek was a universal common language, partly because the Greek slaves had tutored the young Romans but insisted on doing so in their own language; and the bible had by this time been available in Greek for some time, being widely read. The Greek language had also for centuries been used to express and explore philosophical and theological ideas and had the vocabulary and flexibility lacking in Latin or most other languages of the time. It was thus a perfect vehicle for Paul, in his missionary journeys, to reach people of all nationalities. The Greek philosophers had also long been ridiculing the pantheon of gods and goddesses, who had become ever more depraved in their reputed actions, and they had therefore been tending to monotheism: there was a strong feeling that wrongdoing should be punished, guilt expiated. Mystery cults abounded at this time, promising their adherents security against fate and demonic forces in the world, immortality and cleansing – there were many cults where the initiate was bathed in the blood of a slaughtered ram or bull to cleanse him when he joined their ranks. All these things helped to pave the way for the evangelists.

One of the major attractions of Christianity was its promise of equality. There were several different ‘ranks’ in the places where the Jews lived: there were the Jews themselves, born and bred under Moses and the Law. There were the proselytes or converts mentioned in Acts, there were the God-fearers, even among the Roman military, and there were the Gentiles and slaves. The lesser categories also included those Jews who lived outside the Holy Land (and who therefore could not carry out many of the rituals such as Temple worship and sacrifice) and all women and children: the Romans particularly were not used to being ‘second-class citizens’ in any way. Under Christianity all were declared equal. Further hindrances to those aspiring to Judaism had been the food laws and the matter of circumcision: Christianity did away with these, replacing them with baptism and faith, which was another great advantage. The Jews had also accustomed the world to the idea of proselytism or conversion to an exclusive, monotheistic religion: all the other religions and cults accepted each other’s ways to avoid the danger of upsetting a foreign god but the Jews refused to do this. The Jews also were serious about the question of salvation and the fate of those ‘lost’ and therefore were active in seeking converts among the Gentiles: again, this helped the early Christian church.

There were, of course, certain matters that militated against acceptance of Christianity, the foremost being that the message proclaimed a crucified criminal. To Greeks this was ridiculous, to Romans it showed a weak and ineffectual religion, to many Jews it was totally unacceptable. A further difficulty was that the apostles were ordinary men, not learned, nor rabbis, but trying to correct the theology and beliefs of the professionals whose teaching went back to the time of Moses. Paul mentions these difficulties in some of his letters

In the early days, Christianity was not a separate religion but was a sect of Judaism. The apostles used synagogues to preach in, as Jesus had, and the message was first preached to the Jewish people. The apostles wanted the Jews to share their conviction about Jesus and hasten the coming of the kingdom of God. The main message proclaimed was that ‘the scriptures have been fulfilled.’ This would have been the subject of much discussion, as we see in the book of Acts, before the Sanhedrin, before petty princelings holding court, among visitors such as the Ethiopian, and also surely among individuals, traders taking away the stories they had heard and so on, so the message would have spread widely and quickly among the Jews. It would have led to much searching of the scriptures and the seekers would find that the prophecies did indeed fit in the way the apostles claimed. In Acts 17:11 we are told that the ‘Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. Many of the Jews believed, as did also a number of prominent Greek women and many Greek men.’ Preaching in the synagogues was the most important way of reaching Jews and God-fearers alike. However, it was also on occasion divisive and the preachers were sometimes thrown out of synagogues and stoned. Christians made lists of messianic texts – it would have been difficult unrolling the long scrolls to find passages quickly and lists made it much easier; they also copied the way of studying Torah which linked texts with the contemporary scene, finding new meanings in the text this way. They argued their case with Judaic ways of study but it led them to differing conclusions in fulfilment. So the bible (Old Testament), the proving that Jesus fulfilled all the ancient prophecies that they had grown up with all their lives, was the most efficient and successful – if not in many cases the only possible - way that the Christians could reach the Jews.

The message of the evangelists appealed, therefore, to the educated philosophers as much as to the despised slave: it appealed to those seeking reassurance that their lives were not ruled by arbitrary fates and demons; it appealed to mankind’s desire for immortality and meaning in their lives; it appealed to all those who felt sidelined and rejected; it quite literally had a message for everyone who chose to listen. The message came out of Judaism and had to remain acceptable to Jews but at the same time certain ideas were redefined for the Gentile audience: Jesus had declared that the good news was the kingdom of God, but Paul and the others now preached that the good news was Jesus himself. To the Jews Jesus was preached as Man, the Messiah who would judge the living and the dead; to the Gentiles he was preached as Lord in direct response to the ‘lords’ of the cults and ultimately to Caesar as Lord. ‘Lord’ offered protection from the malign forces. ‘Christ’ became almost a surname. The resurrection was also preached to prove that nothing can separate the Christian from his Lord. By the same token, the idea of the ‘kingdom of God’ did not help for the Gentiles, many of whom acknowledged Caesar as their king, so the concept of the kingdom is downplayed by the evangelists and Jesus himself became the salvation, being proclaimed rather than the kingdom itself. ‘Adoption’, on the other hand, was not a Jewish concept at all but was widely known among the Gentiles, particularly in Roman society where adults would be ‘adopted’ by prominent men, including often the emperors, as heirs to lands, estates, positions of power. (remember Ben Hur).(adoption is mentioned three times in Romans, once each in Galatians and Ephesians and nowhere else). I think what this illustrates so clearly is Paul’s claim in his letters to be ‘all things to all men’ – he used whatever terminology and concepts that would work for the people he found himself among.

But of course none of these advantages would have been of more than minimal use without the two great weapons: the Spirit and the Word. Almost the whole of the book of Acts shows evangelistic outreach inspired by the Spirit – He led Stephen and Peter before the Sanhedrin, He led Peter to Cornelius, Philip to the Ethiopian, Paul to go here and not there. It is made quite clear by Luke that the life of the church is to be found in evangelism and in following the promptings of the Spirit. The imitative for evangelism comes from God, just as much as the initiative for creation and redemption.

The second great tool was the Word. The Word was frequently linked with the Spirit in NT writings, the Word is the sword of the Spirit. Wherever they went, the evangelists and missionaries took the word of God with them – the Old Testament, of course, there was no NT then. We are told that ‘all the residents of Asia heard the Word’ and ‘the word of the Lord grew and prevailed’.

As I have said, Paul in particular used any way of preaching that would draw people to his message. However, there were three main points which were important to all. Firstly, they preached a person, they ‘preached Jesus’. To the Jews, Jesus was the fulfilment of God’s work in history, to the Gentiles he marked the end of God’s apparent lack of interest in them. It is interesting that in the epistles and in Acts itself there is little about Jesus’ life or teaching: what was preached was Jesus the man, Jesus crucified, risen and exalted, yet present among his people as witnessed by signs and miracles. This was central to the message: the cross, the resurrection, the power and the significance. Secondly, they preached a gift: the gift of forgiveness, the gift of inclusion, the gift of the Spirit, the gift of grace which none had merited, not the Jews nor the Gentiles. ‘The gift of forgiveness and the gift of the Spirit’ were there from Peter’s first sermon onwards. The third point was that the missionaries demanded a response. They challenged people who said that they had accepted the message to prove it by their actions and their lives. This led to the Christians who happily gave up their lives – on crosses, in the arena, as burning torches for Nero’s gardens – and this in turn called others to the faith. The magicians and sorcerers had to prove their claim by burning all their books, the jailer proved his by personally washing the wounds of Paul (and presumably Silas). You could not accept Jesus and carry on as you were: God expected a response. And the seal of this acceptance was, and is, baptism. Conversion meant both turning away from one’s previous life and turning towards God; baptism is the outward sign of this promise, the sacrament of justification by faith.

Lastly, I would say that another great factor in the success of the early church builders – or builders of the new Israel – was the power they showed, (seen in signs and wonders, in healings and exorcisms), their love to all, their fellowship, the character of their lives, the courage with which they met their deaths and the joy and enthusiasm with which they bore testimony to their Lord. These things persuaded people in their thousands that this new way of life was something to be aspired to, something to commit oneself to.

The Six Woes

2010-07-07T18:01:00.002+01:00

I didn’t know what to do today so I thought about what I could talk about and what you might find interesting and I decided on an old favourite of mine, the fifth chapter of Isaiah. I love all of it but today we are going to deal primarily with the six woes pronounced on different classes of people. These six woes are an ideal rebuttal for anyone who says that the Bible is outdated, irrelevant and dead: they show that mankind doesn’t change and therefore, whatever historical era we live in, the basics of life don’t change either. Fashions come and go, education is in many ways better than it has ever been, we have computers and telephones and television, communication is easier than at any time ever, the world is within reach of a child in a bedroom, but man’s basic nature is exactly as it was in Isaiah’s time and the temptations that Satan uses therefore don’t need to change either.

‘Woe to you who add house to house….’ I think there are two separate strands to this that we can discuss. The first is the more literal – rich people who own large houses surrounded by acres of private land: perhaps the next-door house comes for sale, so to prevent ‘the wrong kind of neighbour’ the rich man buys that plot too and extends his holdings….and he may well also have several houses in different parts of the world, so that wherever he is, he is in his own property. It seems to me when I think about it, that these people are isolating themselves totally from the life of ‘normal’ people. They already only mix socially and in business with others like themselves, but if even in their homes they are totally cut off, probably don’t even see a neighbour walk past the window to wave to, they come to feel that their values are the only ones that exist. Even on holiday, they stay in their own villa rather than a hotel – even a ‘rich person’s hotel’ brings them into contact with others fro, perhaps, a different country, or someone who is treating themselves to the holiday of a lifetime – but if they retreat to their own house, they will not even have this much contact. They create their own world and become impervious to the very real problems faced by those outside the magic circle.

This verse also can lead us on to the more extended problems of greed and materialism in general: land is a finite resource and as such can stand as a symbol for al the other resources that God gave us to share. If our energies and desires are focussed on what we can obtain – whether houses and land or money in the bank or jewellery, paintings, designer clothing – we are making these things our idols and worshipping them rather than their giver. (In Romans, Paul talks about worshipping the creature rather than the creator and it is the same thing.) Woe to materialism does not mean that you are wrong to desire the basics of life – adequate food, shelter, heating, clothing, or anything else – but to desire inordinately more than you can possibly need: why does anyone existing need a fortune of £750 million or more? It is a nonsense figure. Why does anyone need a dress that costs £10,000 – and how can any dress be worth that? Even the cost of material and labour probably is no-where near that, it is the cachet of the designer’s name that you are paying for, something completely abstract: I will pay this amount simply to show that I can afford to do so.

‘Woe to those who rise early in the morning to run after their drinks’: Drink today is a terrible problem. I think it always has been ever since man discovered how to distil alcohol – just look at Hogarth’s pictures of London in Victorian times when they had what were known as ‘gin palaces’ and when drunkenness was as rife as it is now. The American Indians, the Bushmen and the Maoris led austere lives full of dignity until the white man came along and introduced them to alcohol which has proved disastrous for their lies in both physical and mental health. Today we have people in this country who drink from the moment they wake up till they go to bed again. But this verse also mentions music and banquets, so I think that again we need to look in a wider way, and the woe is addressed to those who crave pleasure – eating and drinking and making merry. We talk about ‘drowning one’s sorrows’ but also one’s pleasures are being drowned: this sort of life does not lead to true merriment and joy but to a frenzied searching for the next peak of experience – which leads to drug taking, running ridiculous physical risks or doing something outrageous regardless of whom it may hurt. These people will ‘die of hunger and their masses will be parched with thirst’ : it reminds me of the book of Revelation, Laodicea, when the things they prided themselves on having were the things Jesus said they were without. Neither the food nor the drink, nor the drugs, nor the feasting and merriment and risk taking, will give the true pinnacle of delight but will lead to the ‘grave (which) enlarges its appetite’. Each time, the experience will need to be greater, to be enlarged, to give the same result and it can only ultimately lead to ruin and death.

‘Woe to those who draw sin along’: this was the hardest for me to understand, but I have come to think it means an abandonment to sin, a blatant unashamed life of fin. Cart ropes are very strong and can pull a heavy weight of sin, drawing sin along requires effort, cords of deceit perhaps means that they are trying to fool God. It is a difficult passage and I haven’t found much help anywhere with this. I think the second part is defying God, ‘let him hasten his work that we may see it’ is almost as though they are saying, we won’t believe it unless we see it happen now, in front of us. They are glorifying in their evil ways. They have heard about God, they are not ignorant, but they will not believe in the plan unless it is clear to them in every detail: they will take nothing on trust that they cannot see or feel. When they says ‘the Holy One’ is sounds rather sarcastic in this setting, they don’t feel any fear of the Lord at all.

‘Woe to those who call evil good’: this is what we were discussing in the Freedom in Christ series and is very relevant today. (Well, all of them are!) We live in a time where ‘anything goes’ – if it’s right for me, that’s all that matters. The Bible may say that certain things are wrong, but that was in the old days, to protect the primitive tribes against such and such a disease or a problem or hygiene: we know better now. Truth becomes a thing of mood, of era, of personal ambition. Evil things are accepted as the norm, ‘darkness is called light’, and we cannot even trust our taste buds now. How often have you known of someone having their first taste of beer or whisky and saying, Oh it’s disgusting. But they are told, carry on, after a few glasses you will get to like the taste. What sort of world is it where we press on with something we dislike so that we will come to get the taste for it? It is madness. If truth is not empirical, not unchanging, then it is not truth. Something cannot be true today and not true tomorrow (not in the moral realm, anyway). Today we are expected to accept and actually welcome all sorts of ways of living that go against everything we believe in, because of this modern fanaticism of ‘Political Correctness’: you cannot say something is wrong, you cannot advertise for a Scottish housekeeper or an honest worker, because you may offend someone not included in that description. Morals become confused and perverted and, again, we find people glorying in the evil they live.

‘Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes’: These are the people who say that the bible is out of date, irrelevant, the people that call themselves humanists and say that Mankind is the highest life-form, that there is no need of God. They live by philosophy or science, all the answers are at their fingertips, they have no need of a word written four thousand years ago to tell them how to live. There is nothing wrong with intellect, it is one of the greatest gifts God gave us, that we should be able to think and reason, to look at ourselves objectively, to come to an understanding of the world around us, but we should not put all our confidence in our own abilities and worship reason. This was the source of all the trouble – original sin in the Garden of Eden, reasoning against God, choosing to do what he had forbidden because Adam and Eve thought they knew better what was good for them. There are so many parallels to this verse in Romans chapter 1:12 onwards, and 12, in 1 Corinthians 1:17, in the attitude of the Pharisees of Jesus’ day who thought they knew all the answers and had no need of this young upstart to tell them how to live and worship. In Jesus’ story, when the Pharisee came to the temple to pray he did not ask for anything, just thanked God that he was as he was: he didn’t need to ask, he thought he had it all, The sinner knew he needed mercy, the Pharisee thought he did not need mercy because he was already so righteous. The rich fool planning bigger barns was another. Pride is the greatest sin, it leads in one way or another to so many others: it leads to despising other people, whether of an earlier age or whether your companions of today – remember in the Sermon on the Mount, about calling your brother a rascal, and we decided that contempt was the worst attitude, deserving of being heard in the highest of the three courts. Self-satisfaction, not needing God, leads to moral laxity in a while. Without God, there is no reason to maintain a moral outlook – as we said earlier, if it’s right for me, who dares judge me? Paul talks of those who, ‘professing themselves to be wise, become fools’. In Revelation 18 we are told that the great city of Babylon, which represents what we call civilisation, will be destroyed in one hour. All those things we think we are so wonderful for having done will be as nothing. The woe is called because these people are refusing God’s offer of salvation.

‘Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine’ – we have touched on the issue of alcohol earlier in the second woe: but the interesting thing here is the ‘champion at mixing drinks’ – we are rather beyond the age of cocktails now but if you watch old films or read books from the 1920s, cocktails were the great thing: social life more or less circled around the cocktail hour, the cocktail club or bar: and it still has an air of glamour and a certain risqué quality: not for the fainthearted! I think here also the woes are being pronounced against those whose appetites are unrestrained. Acquitting the guilty for a bribe and denying justice to the innocent is, unfortunately, very much with us today: you only have to look at the scandals in parliament at those who have bought influence, the MPs who are getting away with their expenses thefts; and the innocent to whom justice is denied are those who cannot afford to go to court privately if their case is not taken up by a well wisher or a public body. The innocent are often those who do not know their way around ‘the system’ and have no redress for the wrong they suffer. The innocent are those starving around the world while the rich add house to house and land to land, while others spend their time and money seeking after pleasure and high experience, those who are too selfish to look outside their own lusts and desires, those who call evil good and good evil and those who think they can manage without God, thank you very much. In fact almost al the other five and a half woes seem to me to culminate in this one – that God’s innocent ones will always suffer because everyone else mentioned is too busy looking after himself, getting his won way, worshipping his own gods.

The thing about these passages is that many of the things mentioned are not in themselves bad: we need houses and land, food and clothing, we need a social life (Jesus shared meals and wine all the time with others, man was meant to be in company from Genesis 1 when God made him a helpmeet), there is nothing wrong with music or indeed with alcohol – as I say, Jesus drank wine and many of his parables mentioned vineyards, grapes and wine. The intellect is good. But it is the wrong use of these things, the worship of the thing and not the maker, that leads to evil.

The rest of the chapter, though, is amazingly positive. Yes, those to whom the woes have been pronounced will suffer, ‘their roots will decay and their flowers blow away like dust’, there will be nothing left of them and their treasures, their pleasures, their sinful desires, their perverted outlook, their intellectual pride and their immoderate appetites because ‘they have rejected the law of the Lord almighty and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel’ but those who answer to God’s whistle (verse 26) are quite the opposite: for them, everything will be as good as it can possibly be. Let’s finish by reading the last 5 verses because, like Hope left in the bottom of Pandora’s box, there is always light and that light is God’s salvation.

What does it mean to ‘live like Jesus’?

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If people think in terms of ‘living like Jesus’ there seems to be an agreement that this means taking all the fun out of life. This is not meant to think of ways of making life boring and dull and ‘good’ but of achieving perhaps a new awareness of God in everything we do.

What sort of man do you think Jesus was? He was described as a glutton and a wine-bibber by the Pharisees: these are not words that would have been used had he been an ascetic like John the Baptist. He enjoyed meals at the houses of other people – the Pharisees, Zacchaeus, Martha and Mary…..He went to the wedding at Cana with his mother, he turned the water into wine so that the party would not be spoiled and the host shamed. He was a young Jewish man and they are very prone to dance in celebration and to sing. Why do we always have the impression that he was a boring goody-goody?

In the west, we are very fortunate and tend to take our good fortune very much for granted. Jesus would never have eaten in front of the TV, hardly noticing what goes into his mouth or reached for the last bit of sandwich before realising that he has already eaten it unaware. He would appreciate every mouthful as a gift from the Father-heart of God, part of his abundant provision. The sun and the rain may fall on the just and the unjust alike, God has no favourites in providing the basic necessities of life to the people of his creation, but those whom he has made his own will be aware of everything they eat in a way more likely to be found among the really poor, those who hardly have enough to keep body and soul together. If we think the world is nothing but a cosmic accident, we might well take for granted our food and drink, but when we see it as provided for us by the loving Father and Sovereign God, we must give thanks for his bounty and appreciate every mouthful.

We are very wasteful in the way our civilisation behaves. Everything you waste – concrete items like food or clothing, or abstracts such as someone else’s labour or time – is a gift of God that you have counted for little as well as a repudiation of the efforts that have gone into the farming, the tailoring, the throwing of pots or whatever. Again, we need to make the most of everything that we receive, to enjoy it and value it. As a parent values every egg-box creation of their primary-school child, so God values every creation of mankind’s, and we should learn to appreciate them in the same way.

We often consider ‘going to work’ to be a burden and a penance. Jesus would not get up thinking, ‘another dreary day at work’. He knew that work was the destiny of Adam after the Fall, that in work is to be found respect (both self-respect and that of others), responsibility towards the things of God, servanthood. Work is Man’s side of the bargain with God. The birds of the air do not worry but they surely work to feed themselves out of what God has given (the worms don’t just pop out of the earth to be eaten, the bird has to hunt and fight to get his food and food for his hungry young). But it is also to be done cheerfully, as we discussed with the Sermon on the Mount: duty done resentfully is not duty done at all. We were told in the sermon to go the second mile: we have to do our duty in a cheerful and responsible fashion. To give cheerfully is to give twice.

I can’t imagine that Jesus would care about being in the fashion. What is in the heart is more important than what is on the body. However, decency, modesty, and also an awareness of the beauty that God has given each of us are to be valued. No need to go around in sackcloth, in ‘any old thing’: this is disrespect to God for the body he gave you, which is his temple. We know from the bible the beauties he ordained for the temple in Jerusalem: why would he want your body, which is his new temple, clothed in rags or in dull dreary shapeless items? So, too, why should God disapprove of make-up or styling one’s hair? The Bible is full of references to jewellery and to decoration and beauty. So, respect the body given you by God, feel at liberty to adorn and decorate providing that this does not become an ‘idol’ in the place of God: worshipping the created rather than the Creator.

Jesus healed in a miraculous way over and over again. However, he did not heal everyone. God has given us chemists, doctors and nurses to help the healing process, as well as counsellors and psychiatrists, but he has never given a promise that no Christian will suffer. We must not ignore the help he has given us, saying, God will heal me. But neither must we ever give up the knowledge that, if it is part of his plan and will work to his glory and to the furthering of his purpose here on earth, he will do so. Or, indeed, that it may not be in his plan to heal you at all, any way. But: where God placed a nettle, he also placed a dock leaf. Use those people and those medications that God has provided but be prepared to understand that healing may not be in God’s purpose for you.

How do we spend our leisure time? We have twenty four hours in every day; and some of that time is necessary for sleep, some for work and some for eating. What is over is for us, yes? Well, for the Christian, what is over is for God. I am not saying that we should spend all our leisure time in worship and praise and bible reading but that nothing we do would make us ashamed before God and everything is done in accordance with his will and to his glory. Or to increase our knowledge of him or our awareness of his presence in our lives. Many books and films and TV programmes can increase our knowledge of God, our awareness of his creation and of his work among us, no-one can say that these things are ‘useless’, but it is a question of balance. If one spends all day in front of a small screen, there is less interaction with other people, less ‘community’ and this is limiting what we can achieve on earth.

One great leisure activity these days is shopping. It is easy to confuse our desires with our needs, to get carried away by advertisements and by what we see in the shops and perhaps to spend money there that we should be using for something else or, by using our credit card, to spend money that we simply do not have. But Jesus never said, don’t have the occasional treat. It is a question of moderation, as with all things. He would not approve, though, of those who have wardrobes bulging with things worn once or not at all, bought in a fit of enthusiasm and regretted afterwards but not even passed on to someone who could use it!

Psalm 23

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Deconstructing a psalm word by word and phrase by phrase like this seems to ruin the poetry, turning into an exercise: but we can hope that after we put the psalm together again, it will have gained an extra richness by our awareness of different associations and connections.

The Lord: It is always important to remember that we are working from a translation: for instance, if we were reading this in Latin, there is no word for ‘the’: but God gave us his word in our own language, so we can use the text we have.

So: This is a really positive start to the psalm: it is ‘the’ Lord: not one among many, not any Lord, not even just my lord, (where you might have a different one) not a Lord, but the Lord. Grammatically, ‘the’’ is called the definite article: God is the definite article. The Lord is the one over all, the king, the ruler. David is invoking the one who is above all others, who is unsurpassed: underlying it is the echo of ‘The Lord our God, the Lord is one’.

Is: he exists, he is present now. But not only that, he is present for David three thousand years ago and for us today and for everyone in the past centuries who has repeated this psalm. He is always, from age to age. God is always in the present tense. And there is no element of doubt, no ifs or maybes, no ‘I hope’s’: he is, and that is the end of it. Like Jesus saying, when Abraham was, I am.

My shepherd: He looks after me as an individual: he is ‘my’ shepherd, his care is for me directly, I am under his care and protection: but I am also part of a flock. (The theme of sheep and shepherds and flocks is throughout the bible, of course: and our word ‘congregation’ has as its root the Latin word, ‘grex, gregis’ meaning a flock: so to be a congregation is to flock together). If someone owns one sheep, you do not call him a shepherd: a sheep herder has a flock and man is meant to be part of a community. The relationship is not only God-and-me but also God-and-us. I am an individual and as such, loved and cared for, but I am also a part of the body of Christ, a living stone in the temple. So we are not meant to have to survive in this world by our own devices: we have companions and we also have someone who will look after our welfare at all times, night and day, summer and winter. Furthermore, a sheep is a valuable commodity so we will be protected and prevented from straying, and if we do stray, we will be sought and followed. A sheep is basically a weak, foolish and defenceless creature, who depends on the shepherd as we can depend upon our Lord. Sheep need a sheepfold to keep them secure from predators; our sheepfold is the Lord, our refuge and strong tower. We must also be aware that the Lord of all creation has brought himself down from the heights, has humbled himself, to be our shepherd.

I shall not want: I shall lack nothing, all my needs will be provided for, my shepherd will see to that. It may not be an abundance, it may well not be to excess (God can do excess as we see in nature – not all the acorns from a tree will become a new tree) but it will always be sufficient for my well-being. As long as the Lord is my shepherd (which is always) I need have no cares of this sort: he feeds the birds, he clothes the grass of the field, how much more will he take care of me. This is a straightforward future tense (see further on for discussion re tenses) and allows for no doubt or hesitation: it is simply a matter of fact, I shall want for nothing. Even death cannot cause me to become destitute. And, from a slightly different perspective, I shall, like Paul, learn to be content with any situation – rich or poor, captive or free – and therefore, not only shall I not be in want but I shall no longer desire anything other than what the Lord has given me. So I shall not be in want, and I shall learn not to want (desire): if I learn to be content with what I have, I will never feel a lack.

He maketh me to lie down: This is the time of rest, of contemplation, we are not supposed to spend all our lives rushing from pillar to post, always busy, active, doing: there is also a time for quietitude, for reflection. We have to work (again, Paul said he who does not work shall not eat, work is the inheritance from Adam’s disobedience but also, faith without works is dead) Work is important but it is not to be a full-time occupation. It is as important to have time for one’s mind and spirit to absorb and make sense of all that is going on.

And note that the emphasis is on ‘me’ – I am loved and nurtured for who I am, a special one in the eyes of God (the one bit I loved in The Shack was where God says, ‘I am especially fond of…..’ and it turns out he (she) is ‘especially fond’ of each and every one of us!) He is looking after me as an individual, though that does not negate what I said earlier about being part of a community.

In green pastures: We are not to make do with the bare earth to rest on, a couch is provided: also nourishment and peace. The pastures are a symbol, too, of the word of God, wherein we can rest and be nourished and find peace. Green is the colour of hope and of living things. But we go back to the previous, ‘he maketh me’ – it is God’s initiative, God’s gift to lead us to his word where we will find all these things. There are some who are aware of the pastures but they cannot come there, it is God’s leading.

He leadeth me: This again shows that God is the one in charge, he is our guide, showing us the way, We are not always intended to stay in the pastures, resting; we have to get up and go, follow where we are led, and we will never be wandering alone and lost.

Beside the still waters: ‘Still waters run deep’: on the surface it can appear still but there can be an undercurrent that prevents stagnation, that keeps it fresh. The Holy Spirit is the living water that cleanses, refreshes and fertilises, and he likes peace in which to work, not raging torrents and cataracts that endanger us. We need to be at peace for him to be able to do his work, not fighting and struggling against adversity. And note that we are not driven to this place, but led there gently as a shepherd leads his sheep.

This passage always reminds me of the hymn that goes: ‘Not for ever by still waters/Would we idly rest and stay/But would smite the living fountain/From the rocks along our way’. We are soldiers of Christ, we are involved in the battle, as human beings we need challenge and excitement, an element of risk, perhaps, but – like we said in the Sermon on the Mount – even in the midst of battle, we can find that place within us, the closet if you like, where we can find the peace of God, where the Holy Spirit can work within us in quietness.

He restoreth my soul: It is not only our physical welfare that he cares about but he gives me food and water for my spirit as well; the damage caused by the hurly-burly of the world will be soothed by his peace and my soul restored to its full health and potential. Where I am sinful, he sanctifies me; where I am weak, he strengthens me, when I am sorrowful, he comforts me.

He leadeth me in paths of righteousness: Again, the initiative is God’s, he will lead

me back to a right relationship with him, he will establish this so that I may be in his presence where I will find the peace and wellbeing we have been speaking of. But he will not force me: I am led, not forced. In myself, I cannot find the path out of sin and into righteousness, I am again dependent upon his leading (like the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night). When we consent to be led, we are being obedient to the will of God; but we cannot obey in some things and disobey in others. (again, like the Ten Commandments or the Beatitudes) To walk the paths of righteousness, of a right relationship with the Lord, means obeying him in all things, listening for his leading in all circumstances, lest we go astray.

For his name’s sake: He does all these things for us out of his free grace, to the honour of his name, that his creation be not lost forever. In all our obedience we must give honour and glory to the name of the Lord. He does these things for us because he loves us but always because his honour is at stake: if God’s people are abandoned or destroyed like everyone else, Satan will say, (as Moses suggested) that he took them out of Egypt to let them die in the wilderness because he could not lead them into the promised country

Yea, though I walk: I am led but not carried: I still have the choice to follow or not to follow, I have a responsibility to follow but can go astray if I ignore the path I am shown. But I am to walk, not to rush; I am to do things in due time and order, (like Paul said to the Corinthians!) not rush headlong without seeing what lies ahead. We are not hurrying ahead in a panic or diving off to one side to hide. To walk is a measured action, it indicates the steady advance of a soul which knows its road, knows its end, resolves to follow the path, feels quite safe, and is therefore perfectly calm and composed. Even as we come to death, we do not hesitate or turn back but we walk forward secure in the love of God.

Through the valley of the shadow of death: I have heard people say of someone very ill, that ‘he is in the valley of the shadow of death’, but to me this phrase has always meant the whole of our life, cradle to grave, for from the moment we are born, death is ahead of us and places a limit on our lives, as a valley has an end. The valley is a protected place; we are not scrambling around on the mountain tops where the strong winds blow, (though, as I said earlier, we are also in a battle – this is part of the contradiction that we find throughout our studies) but we are secure in our shelter: the valley is fertile with streams and rivers finding their way to the valley bottom, so it is a pleasant place to be. God intended life on this earth to be pleasant, it was the Fall that caused the problems. The shadow of death is like the shadow of the mountains encircling it – sunshine does reach the valley but cannot be taken for granted as a permanent thing: there will always be shadows – pain and suffering – which are part of our life. We are walking through the valley, not ‘walking around in it’, so we are making continual progress and there is an end to our journey. And the valley is of the shadow of death only, death has no substance for the one walking with God. Where there is shadow, there will also be light, and the light of heaven is shining behind the mountains. There is no need to fear a shadow – the shadow of a sword cannot kill, the shadow of a tree cannot block your path. If we live our lives walking through the valley with God, death is not the end but a new opening, as the valley opens out into the sunlit plains.

I will fear no evil: The greatest evil, as Satan well knows, is fear itself. In 1 John 3 John says, ’There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear....he that feareth is not made perfect in love’. In the Sermon on the Mount we talked about how useless fear makes us: it weakens us morally and can also lead to physical weakness such as ulcers or heart problems. And 99% of what we fear doesn’t happen: we are wasting the present by living in a future that is totally fictional – when something is actually happening to us, we are too busy dealing with the situation to be afraid, fear is a projection into a future that probably will not happen but which can still ruin today. Fear is a thief: fear steals our joy, fear steals our pleasure in today, fear steals our peace, our courage, our health, our strength, our will, it is a potent weapon of Satan’s. But God has warned me that trials lie ahead, so they will not come as a surprise, and I will be equipped to deal with them. With God’s leading we will not fear anything, not even the evil one himself, for he has already been conquered and he has no authority over us apart from that which we allow him to have.

Now we have to look at grammar for a moment. In the first verse we had the phrase ‘I shall not want’. That is a straightforward future tense, something that is, or is not, going to happen in the time ahead. Now we have ‘I will fear no evil’. This psalm is a perfect example of the use of these two words: but, as I was saying earlier about translations, this is not necessarily so in other languages: for instance, in my French bible, the simple future is used in all three instances in this psalm. But in this instance, ‘I will’ is what I call ‘a future of intention’. It means, I am determined, I have made up my mind, I have made a conscious choice that I will not allow fear to disarm me or to make me leave the path I have been shown. We will come across this again later, so remember it!

For thou art with me: This is how we know that the evil one has been conquered and we have no need to fear him or anything else: because we are walking with the Lord: he has given us peace, protection, nourishment, instruction and has restored my soul, so I am in fit state to cope with anything that comes my way because God is there with me, showing me the dangers that lie ahead and around bu

t assuring me that I do not have to face them alone. If we have God, we have everything. And, as we mentioned earlier, I am part of a community, I have others around me to help: I am not alone in this journey.

Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me: The symbols of your sovereignty, the rod and the sceptre of the king, by which you govern and rule your people, your flock, which carry the authority of your position. While I may not see God face to face, I can see the symbols of his presence and of his authority (his creations, his Word, the cross) and that is enough for me, because I trust him and his word and know that he will never leave me, nor forsake me.

Thou preparest a table before me: God is shown here as our host but also he has prepared the table as a servant does, all is ready and waiting, we do not have to snatch a rough meal (think of the men in the trenches, often not even able to heat water to prepare their meals) before facing the battle with the enemies. God prepared for us the table of communion, when we can remember the plan for our salvation and the triumph of Jesus over his enemies. God has prepared a feast for us of the Bread of Life in Jesus, the wine of his spilt blood, and the living water of the Holy Spirit after partaking of which none shall thirst. When you are exhausted and battle weary, a drink of fresh sparkling spring water is sometimes what does you the most good! The preparation of the table implies peace and beauty, graciousness and love and orderliness. (white table cloth, flowers in the middle, silver candlesticks, good china and glassware, finger bowls with rose petals in the water….)

In the presence of mine enemies: the Christian is told that he will have enemies, that the world will be against him as it was against Jesus. Personally, I always had a bit of a problem with this verse: some of you already know this but bear with me. It always sounded a little gloating that the feast was laid for me before my enemies, rubbing their noses in their defeat. And although there are probably plenty of people who dislike me, I am not sure that I have enemies in the sense that David did. But one morning before cell I was thinking, how can I call myself a Christian when I still harbour pride and impatience and envy and doubt? And then this psalm came into my mind and when I reached this point, it was as though God told me, these are your enemies, this pride and envy and impatience and doubt, this is what is trying to keep you from me but they cannot do so, I will lay the feast before you and all they can do is look on and fume and gnash their teeth’. In Romans 8, Paul says that nothing, ‘neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers……nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God. which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ The table is laid for us and there is nothing our ‘enemies’ can do about it.

Thou anointest my head with oil: Again, in the Sermon, we talked about the fact that the root of the word for the olive from which the oil comes, is the same as the root of the word for mercy, which is why the dove brought an olive leaf back to the ark. We are anointed with the mercy of God, as a priest or a king is anointed before they can hold their office. We are to be a royal priesthood and a holy nation and therefore the anointing is vital or we have no authority. We need this anointing daily from the Holy Spirit to enable us to walk the way of God. and again, it is a picture of peace, standing before God for his anointing: but we must remember too that the anointing carries with it a responsibility, as a priest or a monarch takes upon himself the responsibility of his position.

My cup runneth over: God has provided more than enough for our needs – not necessarily, as I said earlier, because he has given us an excess but because we have learned to be content with what we have. A discontented man will never have enough, someone searching for he-knows-not-what and who has not discovered the peace in God, will never find that which satisfies his soul, that ‘eternity placed in the heart of man’ can never be filled by anyone else but God; but when we have found our way to him, responding to his calling, whatever we have is enough for us and more than enough. As we said in the early verses, we shall not want more than God has seen fit to give us. Desire has been conquered.

I am not saying that we will necessarily be short of this world’s treasures: I think of Malachi, ‘I shall open the storehouses of heaven and your barns will not be big enough to hold it all.’ When we have learned not to desire, God may well pour out earthly riches upon us, but that is his choosing, not our yearning.

Surely: Today we use the word ‘surely’ with a negative association – ‘surely he did that before he left? Surely she will come if she knows I’m ill?’ but there is the expectation of a negative answer. Here, of course, it means ‘certainly’, without any doubt whatsoever, if you can rely on anything, it is this.

goodness and mercy: the two great gifts of God that come only from his grace, that cannot be deserved or earned, but which he is pleased to pour out upon us if we love him and are obedient to his following. God’s goodness and mercy are not external things that he gives us but are part of his very nature.

shall follow me all the days of my life: They are going to follow me, there is no question about it. In the third person, the rule is the opposite of the previous example where it was ‘I will’. ‘He shall’ has the force of determination, of making one’s mind up to do something, whereas ‘he will’ is the simple future tense. So here again we have what I call the ‘future of intention’: whatever may happen, the goodness and mercy are fixed in their following, they cannot be diverted.

In the same way as a king has a retinue or a priest has his acolytes, so we have these companions wherever we go. So if God is leading us and his goodness and mercy are following us, we are protected both ahead and behind, there is nowhere where we can be attacked without God’s knowledge and out of reach of his aid. They will be with me every day, whether it is a day of sunshine or a day of shadow, fasting and feasting, summer or winter. His goodness provides for our needs and his mercy blots out our transgressions. There is nothing else which we require.

And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever: a servant does not ‘dwell’ in a house, even if he ‘lives in’. A son or daughter dwells there, a family dwells there together. It is the Lord’s house, he is in authority over all who dwell there, he has paid the bills in the Lord Jesus Christ, it is he who will preside over mealtimes, it is he who creates the atmosphere in which we shall all live. However, once again it is the tense of intention: I will dwell there: I am not saying that it is our choice to be there, it is God’s calling for each of us, but I am determined not to forfeit my right to dwell there, not to turn aside. And this is ‘forever’, not just in the future but also now; we are in the world but not of the world because our dwelling place is the house of the Lord, and when we die, we shall dwell there throughout eternity. Nothing can harm us in his house, no evil can come there, we are as protected and fed and rested in his house as we were in the green pastures of the early verses. We have come full circle in the love, the goodness and the mercy of God.

Stories Jesus told

2010-06-09T21:04:00.004+01:00

There is a wide variety of parables told in the three synoptic gospels (though none in John’s) and they have different aims and meanings within Jesus’ teaching. Many of them work on several levels and we could easily do a whole teaching on the parables alone. But today we are concentrating on the concept of the new Israel and I have chosen parables and one or two events which illustrate this theme. I am not saying that this is the only meaning within the parable, but that this is an important strand of the teaching. The story Jesus told was still the story of Israel and her relationship with God and this is illustrated in many of his parables and ways of putting things.

Parables were not a ‘Jesus invention’. Jewish teachers had been using this method for a long time. On example of a Jewish parable is of a man who had to go before a judge and he asked three good friends to go with him. One, whom he had considered his closest friend, refused point-blank: the second said he would go as far as the door and no further: the third, whom he had least considered among his acquaintances, agreed to stand as advocate before the judge and pleaded his case so well that he was acquitted. The first friend was the man’s money that availed him nothing: the second was the man’s worldly friends who came to the tomb but could come no further: and the third was the Law and the good deeds performed in his lifetime, which acquitted him before the judgement seat.

The story of Dives and Lazarus is not particularly intended as a picture of the after-life. As I explained this morning, most Jewish thought took the kingdom of God to be very much a ‘this-worldly’ kingdom, not some distant ‘heaven’. Jesus is using the story to illustrate the necessity for an inclusive community. it is a picture to illustrate a truth, the truth being that Abraham welcomes the poor and needy as Jesus is welcoming them now. The truth is there that Dives had all the warnings he needed in the OT but did not heed them, the 5 brothers have the same information available and this is all we need. Also, there was the feeling that rich men had received their riches as a blessing from God: therefore if the rich man finds it as hard to get into heaven as a camel to pass through the eye of a needle: or if Dives was suffering in hell, this was a complete turn-around for the Jewish listeners. (The apostles say, amazed: ‘if the rich cannot get in, then who can?’) Dives was God’s provision for Lazarus the beggar: Dives failed to fulfil his responsibility and therefore both of the men suffered from this faulty relationship: Lazarus in this life and Dives later. Had Dives fulfilled his part, Lazarus would have received the blessing of help and Dives the ‘mitzvah’ of being able to give help. We discussed in a previous meeting the fact that each mitzvah performed on earth counted as a treasure in heaven for the giver, it was a really important aspect of Jewish thought: but the story of Dives shows clearly that Jesus was aware that this was not always carried out as it should be. The story also shows that we have all we need in the living word of God to come to the correct conclusions – Moses and the prophets (rather like Paul in Romans: ‘The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse’. Romans 1:18-20) and a visit from ‘beyond the grave’ would be of no help at all if these sources were ignored.

Perhaps the most important story, and one very hard for the Jews to accept, was the story of the wedding banquet. There are two stories here, one in Matthew and one in Luke, and they are not identical, but the main theme is that it shows that they were taking their inheritance for granted, there has obviously been a long-term alienation between the king and the people (Israel and her God) that should make the people treat the servants in this cavalier way, hurting and even killing them. ‘They which were bidden’ and who are not worthy are the Israelites and it was being made clear here that they could no longer rely on being ‘God’s chosen people’, the children of Abraham; but that, if they rejected the way Jesus was offering, it would be opened to others, to the despised Gentiles – the ‘beggars and strays in the highway’. This is a theme that has been running since John the Baptist told them not to rely on their heritage because ‘God can raise up children for Abraham from these stones’. The Jews thought that they were special, the chosen ones, that God was theirs. This parable shows that they cannot assume that the kingdom will be theirs if they are too busy in other (worldly) directions to come to the feast that God has prepared. If their land or their oxen or their families are keeping them away from God, then he can find other people to fill his kingdom. And he will find them among both the righteous and the sinners – ‘the servants…gathered together all as many as they found, both bad and good’. God can make sons of Abraham from the Gentiles – a new way of being Israel. There is, however, still a caveat for the Gentiles: the man who was not clothed appropriately was cast out. I take this to mean that the guests would have been offered suitable clothing as they came in from the highway, but one was arrogant enough to say, ‘if he invites me as I am, I shall come as I am. I’m not going to change’. The garment could be seen as the ‘putting on’ of Christ. If God calls us, we may come, but not in that attitude of arrogance and bragging; we must be willing to change, to become what he asks of us. We need the humility to recognise that change is necessary as the Jews need the humility to know that God must come first.

The healings were also an important part of this message of a new way of being Israel. In particular I am thinking of the man blind from birth and the man crippled from birth. For both of these, being healed meant learning a whole new way not only of being for them but also of relating to others around them. Both would have been almost totally dependent on other people – no welfare state and disability aids for them. The blind man would have some idea of the world around him from his other senses, but how could he ever have imagined a sunset or a distant range of mountains against the skyline? The cripple would see other people walking, running, jumping freely and know he could not go anywhere on his own. Suddenly, they have to adapt to a new way of life: who are they now that their identifying feature has been taken away – the blind son of Bartimaeus, the cripple at the Beautiful Gate. Those people are now dead, and the new ones must take their place; how are they to earn a living now they can no longer beg? Are they now in competition with those who used to care for them, for work, for available resources, for women, perhaps? How about those who used to care for them: will they be relieved or will they feel unwanted and resentful after all these years? After the initial euphoria was passed, did either of them look back and think, ‘Life was so much simpler before this happened to me?’ in the same way as the Israelites looked back to the ‘cucumbers and melons’ of Egypt when they tasted freedom in the desert? Jesus gave them their freedom and they had to learn how to use it. The blind man could now manage for himself, the cripple could walk to Jericho if he wanted, or to Galilee, without consulting anyone else. Both freedom and healing bring problems of their own, as I was saying when we were studying strongholds recently. These two men, and the others healed by Jesus, had to learn a new way of being themselves and a new way of being in the community. Being Israel is being free in Jesus Christ and learning to see the world in a new way.

The story of the Good Samaritan is so well-known that surely there is nothing more to say about it? Again, this works on several levels, from being an allegory of mankind caught between the devil’s works and the Saviour to the superficial, theme of helping one another. But again, it shows how the new community must include the needy, the outcast. The reason given by commentators for the ‘passing-by’ of the Levite and the priest is that they would become unclean by contact if the injured man should die while they are caring for him, and that they were unwilling to go through the cleansing process – perhaps it was nearly the Sabbath or some important feast. The story shows, like the Sermon on the Mount, that the spirit of the law is more important than the outer rituals. Jesus told the Pharisees that the ritual washing of hands and cups was not what mattered but what was in the heart; and here he is saying the same thing. The Samaritan’s heart was right, whereas strict adherence to the rules of uncleanness led to inhumanity to a fellow-being.

As we discussed once before, the story of the talents shows that those who fulfil the expectations of God, who carry out their duties conscientiously, do not get a rest for their pains, but get given more work to do! Of those who are given much is much expected. God has given all of us different talents and we are expected to use them in his service, so that they may increase by anything from 30 to 100-fold. Those that let their talents – or their possessions, their wealth – lie unused will find that they lose what they thought they had, that they clung onto so tightly that they would not risk them. (Mr Mean: potatoes)Without risk, there is no growth. Those like the Pharisees who scrupulously tithed their herbs and spices and found excuses not to support their parents are like the man who buried his talent to keep it safe: they obey the letter of the law but there is no generosity in their hearts, no ‘casting their bread upon the waters’, just a rigorous accounting procedure which leads to sterility and lack of growth.

Vineyard owner and son: this is one of the places where Jesus makes clear that he sees himself as the Messiah who comes from God, the owner. This is another parable told to correct the Jewish assumptions. It was they who, despite their claim to be the Chosen Ones, had mistreated the master’s servants who came, they who had ignored and killed the prophets and Jesus also makes it clear here that he will die. In fact it was not a new thing in Judaism, the notion that one man would die for the purification of Israel, (when the head of the Sanhedrin says that one man should lose his life for the many, this is taken as quite a normal sort of statement by the others, not commented upon); it cropped up a lot in their history and their martyrs ‘gave their lives’ for Israel before God. Lamentations 4:22: the kingdom would come after a time of great suffering, whether of Israel as a whole or some representative. The picture of Israel as God’s vineyard was not new to the hearers – we get it in Isaiah Ch 5. The husbandmen are (like the shepherds in Ezekiel) the spiritual leaders of the people and should have brought ‘good fruit’ out of the people but failed in what they should be doing. This includes the leaders throughout the history – it is a national responsibility but the ‘kingdom of God shall be taken from you’. It also shows, when Jesus mentions about the ‘stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone’, that God can turn evil into saving grace – the evil of the crucifixion into our salvation – as he turned the evil to good in the case of Joseph who told his brothers, ‘You meant it for evil but God meant it to save your lives’.

The workers in the vineyard where payment is the same whether the service has been long or short. There are two strands here which are relevant to our theme.

Israel

has been God’s chosen race and thinks that this fact and the centuries of history behind her entitles her to his benevolence. But John has said that he could raise up sons for Abraham from the stones here and now, and several times Jesus makes it clear that the Israelites will not accede to the kingdom by right, Gentiles will be accepted because the Jews turned away, like the parable of the wedding feast. But also it is another argument against the letter of the Law: the first workers ‘had agreed for a penny a day’ – they had a contract, an agreement, the owner had a legal obligation towards them. But the latter workers were told, ‘Whatsoever is right, I will give you’. They trusted him, relying on his goodwill, his grace, without negotiating beforehand for ‘their rights’. These people receive a proportionately greater reward than those who had made a definite bargain. On top of which, the original party of workers were in effect claiming that ‘works’ gave them right to ‘grace’ – they felt they should have been paid more than the contract because they did more work than the others, they had ‘earned’ their reward.

The sons who say they will and don’t or won’t and do are again like the Israelites and the Gentiles: the Israelites may say that they do what God asks of them but they don’t do it: the Gentiles are ignorant but many follow the right road anyway.

The Prodigal Son story, again, is so well known it is hardly necessary to mention it. (When I was a child, I thought that the word ‘prodigal’ meant something to do with coming home!) We know that it is about the welcoming father and the penitent son and is a picture of God welcoming

Israel

(and by extension, us) back even after they had turned their backs on him, squandered their birthright, consorted with sinners and prostitutes until they became near to despair. At the same time, it is an ‘inter-Israelite’ division between the elder son, the Pharisees who have never stepped out of line, have always obeyed the rules; who, as Isaiah had said, ‘draw nigh with their lips but their heart is far from me’, who are blind to mercy and to their own misery and guilt: and the younger son who represents the harlots and wastrels who see their error and return to God – both the sinners of Israel and the Gentiles. The new Israel will welcome the sinners, and the followers of the Law will have to watch them being feasted and rejoiced over.

The overthrowing of the tables in the Temple: this demonstrates the cleansing of our hearts of the robbers and liars that dwell there to cleanse it for the indwelling of Christ. It also shows that through Jesus, the Temple sacrifices will come to end – on this day, temporarily, (because the offerings are not available) but in the end, permanently. The new Israel will not need the Temple, the priests or the offerings because the final offering will have been made and God’s new temple will be the Church in which we are living stones.

The urgency of Jesus’ message is shown in the parable of the wise and foolish virgins: we just do not know when we may be called to God’s side. The foolish virgins think that they are fully prepared, they are prepared at that time, but they have not taken into account the fact that other circumstances might intervene – the unexpected delay of the bridegroom, for instance – and in those new circumstances, the preparations they had made might not be sufficient. The wise virgins have made preparations in advance against the coming of the Lord, they are ready whatever the circumstances that intervene. We cannot put our salvation off to a more convenient time: we may miss it altogether. The lamp is an outward profession of faith and the oil is that which feeds the true faith – works of charity, self-denial, humility. The foolish virgins were perhaps negligent in the above attitudes and in prayer and so they have only the oil that was then in their lamps and no renewal: similar to the weeds that fell on thin soil which sprang up but couldn’t last because there was no depth of soil. The trimming of the lamps is the necessary self-examination – each person must live by their own faith and cannot borrow off someone else as the foolish virgins attempt to do; and the whole suggests that perseverance in the life of faith is needed if we are to be ready when the Lord comes. So again we are told that the old way of following the law and the Pharisees’ teaching is not enough for the new Israel – there has to be a much more living inner foundation of faith and prayer, not an assumption that ritual and rote will be enough to ensure salvation.

A contrasting tale is told of the rich farmer who certainly did plan ahead, but only for his life in this world. He built his huge barns, preparing for a long life ahead of him in worldly terms but little knowing that the only thing that really mattered that day was his soul. Our preparations must be of the right sort; not this-worldly but other-worldly. This, again, reinforces the idea that being rich is not in fact an automatic sign of God’s favour as had previously been believed.

All the stories Jesus told were firmly rooted in their daily lives and experience – farming, wedding feasts, overlords, debt, the Law, but somehow the meaning always came out a little differently from the way the people expected. Instead of being praised for being the people of God they were told that others could easily be found to take their place. Instead of the rich being the favoured ones, suddenly the poor and outcast have the starring roles. Instead of the hated Samaritan being the villain of the piece, he is the hero. Everything is turned upside down, the people are told that if they want to continue to be

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they need to rethink everything they have been taught. The Law is not erased but it is reinterpreted, their future is not assured but must be renegotiated, things they took for granted can no longer be relied upon. And all this was coming, not from some learned rabbi in a synagogue who had studied and thought for many long years but from a country carpenter preaching in the fields and from a boat on the lake and on the mountains. Jesus certainly gave the people of his time a lot to think about!

Healing

2010-06-02T17:53:00.003+01:00

Matthew 8.

The man with leprosy: to have leprosy was to be considered dead – the priests even said the burial service over you before you were exiled - you could not enter a walled city, mingle with people, eat with them, approach them nearer than six feet.. It was an act of great daring for the leper to approach Jesus in the large crowds that were following him, and had he been apprehended he could have been in serious trouble. (How did the people not notice him? Normally would be very aware of such a person. All attention focused on Jesus?) So the man was willing to take a huge risk in order to come close to Jesus. Had he approached a rabbi, he would have been stoned to death: he was able to approach Jesus with confidence that he would be accepted. No-one is too unclean to come before Jesus Christ. Furthermore, he approached Jesus in a very humble way – ‘if you are willing’. He had presumably been aware of the many healings that had taken place but he was not claiming any sort of ‘right’ to be healed, there is no suggestion of ‘my need is greater than theirs’. He accepted that it was the free gift from Jesus and might not, indeed, be forthcoming just for the asking. He knelt before Jesus as before a king, he worshipped him as a god, and he acknowledges that Jesus has the power to do this thing – you can make me clean’.

Jesus responded immediately with compassion: he reached out and touched the man – this was in itself remarkable and startling to those around as no-one would touch a leper and, if they did, they themselves would become unclean under the law. To Jesus, compassion and love and giving help override the law. He states that he is willing to do this – it is his choice. He then enjoins silence on the man: there is a a lot of discussion about the enjoinging to silence, and the most prominent reasoning seems to be that Jesus did not want to be hailed as a king because of the signs and wonders he could perform, did not want to be taken up by the rebels against Rome who wanted a political leader amd a political triumph. Jesus wanted to educate men, to change their attitudes and ideas so that they would see that love is a more powerful force than military might. He tells the leper to show himself to the priest and offer the gifts mentioned in the law – again, he has not come to take the place of the law but to fulfil it. The ritual for acknowledging a cured leper is set out in Leviticus and the leper needs to go through this ceremony so that he may receive a certificate from the priests which will allow him back into the ‘real world’ – he can only be accepted in the daily life of the city with this official certification of his cleanness. Again, perhaps Jesus here is saying that we should not ignore the human help at our disposal – we cannot just ask for a miracle and sit back and wait for it to happen without making use of those people that God has already sent into our lives to help us. Also, if this man is coming back into society, he needs to co-operate with what society asks of him. Jesus asks the healed man to be a testimony – we must not shout aloud to all the world at what we receive from the Lord but in the proper place we must be willing to testify. The leper is on the cusp between the old dispensation and the new – healed by Jesus but told to obey the instructions in the law and the show himself to the priests. For him, it is almost like a rebirth – being a leper was to be considered dead, he is now clean and restored to life.

The Centurion

The centurion was a Roman. When discussing the book of Revelation we talked about eh Roman Empire and how it encompassed most of the known world. Romans were extremely proud of their country, their heritage, their conquests, their customs. It is inconceivable that this man, whose compassion is shown by his concern for his servant, would not first have gone to the traditional sources of help to be found in Roman doctors and their medicines, and also Roman gods. A centurion was the backbone of the Roman army, much like a Regimental Sergeant Major today, he was a man who lived a disciplined life and expected discipline from those he watched over. There are several centurions mentioned in the gospels and in Acts and each one is shown as an honourable man. He would not normally consider going to see a barefoot local wandering preacher for healing.

However, this man’s pride is of the right sort, he is not proud in his soul but willing to learn, to acknowledge different ways of being, and of doing things. He approached Jesus in a very practical way, he does not beat about the bush but comes straight to the point: he can see that Jesus is a busy man and he says in very few words what his problem is, without going into a long history of the illness or the cures and treatments already tried. The centurion is a man of unusual compassion – in Roman times slaves were only one step up among their possessions from a dog or a horse and were certainly expendable: but this centurion is willing to spend time and presumably money if required, for the good of his slave, whom he recognises as a human brother. Jesus will appreciate this and his reaction is immediate – he doesn’t say, as he said to the Phoenician woman, that he has come only to Israel. The centurion, like the leper, is humble – he acknowledges that Jesus, as a Jew, would not be able to enter his Gentile house. In fact, in one version, he does not even come himself but sends someone to ask on his behalf. His faith is complete – he has tried everything else, this is his last resort, but he has no doubt that this will work. Jesus does not mind if we come to him in desperation, as a last resort, as long as we come in faith. The centurion acknowledges this special authority that others recognise in Jesus – to the military man it is a welcome thing that increases his faith and his confidence. He knows that the authority still holds sway even in the physical absence of the commander – a general doesn’t have to be with his troops for them to acknowledge his command over them. The centurion accepts that the illness will give ground before this healer: therefore he is demonstrating that Jesus’ healing is supernatural, that he has a power transcending human power. This also is another instance of the fact that it was not the servant’s faith that mattered, the master’s was sufficient. (it is possible too that the servant knew of Jesus and had faith in the healing but there is nothing in the text to indicate this). So two are direct requests and two are intercessions for others.

Mark 5

We have two almost parallel stories here. Jairus is a ‘big man’ in the temple world, one of the rulers of the synagogue. We know that many of the synagogue people were against Jesus and that those who acknowledged Jesus could be thrown out of the synagogue (which presumably would have wide-ranging social and financial implications for someone). – Jairus would have had to be courageous to go against the prevailing attitudes to seek out the healer, but to him, his daughter was more important than his position. His love triumphed over his worldly ambitions. So he humbled himself to come, he fell at Jesus’ feet and pleaded with him – and this from a man presumably used to commanding obedience! He differs from the centurion in that he feels the need of Jesus’ physical touch for his daughter. Again, Jairus has come when Jesus is in the middle of a huge crowd, he came openly and publicly, not trying to avoid being seen. His need was too great to worry about something like his own reputation.

On the way, a woman comes out. Her illness is one that by Judaic law would make her ‘unclean’ in the same sort of way as the leper was unclean and she, also, should not have been out in the streets, coming into contact with other people. So she too, has to overcome a traditional, long-standing and inbuilt prohibition but she is desperate enough to do so. We are specifically told that she has tried many other cures over the years and has paid a lot of money out to doctors and others but her condition is getting worse. If ‘blood’ equals ‘life’ as we are told in the books of Moses, then her bleeding is her life being wasted, running away from her: she has tried to overcome this through ‘the world’, through what money can buy for her, but her condition gets worse. She was totally convinced that Jesus could heal her, but so humble, so unassuming, so afraid, that she did not even feel she could push through the crowd or speak to him. There is almost an element of superstition in her thinking that she could touch his clothing and be healed, but this happens again in Acts when people take handkerchiefs from the apostles and these talismans are a cure – the Roman Catholic Church carries on this tradition. Yet she could not be anonymous – Jesus was conscious of the power being used (Luke on two occasions talks about ‘the power of the Spirit for healing’ and the ‘power of God was upon him for healing’) and, although he surely would know and in other gospels does know, here he makes her confess openly – another testimony. She was fearful because she had taken the blessing without permission, she had broken a rigid law of her people, and she had to say publicly that she had done this. It took a lot of courage. Sometimes, even today, people find it hard to confess that they have been healed through prayer or –miracle, they are almost embarrassed by it, aren’t they?

Jesus then is involved again with Jairus and his daughter: he tells Jairus ‘do not be afraid’ – fear is the most debilitating of all human emotions. The servants gave up when the girl died – ‘why bother the teacher?’ They felt it was too late even to have hope. But Jesus is saying, even when hope is gone, he can help if we have courage to face a situation. This healing was done in a much more private way – he only allowed the three who had also been with him at the Transfiguration and in the Garden, the special ones in the band, he put out all the neighbours and family who were in the room, shut the door and called the girl back to this life. He shows a very practical streak when his instruction is that they give the child something to eat – she will be weak and needs strengthening. It is interesting too that the girl is twelve years old, and the woman whom he healed from the bleeding had been suffering for twelve years.

So:

How do we approach Jesus if we have something to ask of him?

Be willing to take a risk – perhaps to break a custom or to look silly in front of others.

Be willing to be open about it – come also when the crowds are there, not just in the quiet times.

Be willing to acknowledge Jesus’ power and authority, and also his power to say no.

Be willing to testify if the healing takes place. Give Jesus the credit publicly.

To have complete faith that Jesus can do what you ask but may not do it.

It doesn’t matter if you come in desperation, as a last resort, having tried everything else you can think of. Like the workers in the vineyard, you can come late to the kingdom.

Be humble before the Lord. Acknowledge that the healing is a gift from God and not something you have a right to.

Acknowledge that the healing costs Jesus something – he was aware of his power being used for the woman. Also twice in Luke, there is mention that Jesus had the ‘power of the spirit’ for healing. It is not an ‘easy’ thing even for God.

High position in this world does not count for anything before Jesus – the leper and the woman in the street are no less to Jesus than the centurion and the synagogue ruler.

Be willing to intercede for others who cannot speak for themselves.

Lessons for the Jews: that they do not have an automatic right to an inheritance in the Lord because they are descended from Abraham: faith counts for more than an accident of birth. Gentiles are as much God’s children as Jews. Jesus healed a roman slave as well as the daughter of a prominent Jew, and two outcasts who were worthless in the eyes of their neighbours, in fact the leper is as good as dead.

Men of Prayer - Nehemiah

2010-05-26T18:44:00.001+01:00

There are many instances of men of prayer that we could study in the OT and the NT alike; but Nehemiah is a good place to start. I am sure you all know who he was: a layman, a Jew of the Babylonian exile who was cup-bearer to the great Artaxerxes. His name means ‘The Lord has comforted’.

Cup-bearer was a position of great authority. At each meal he tested the king’s wine to make sure that it was not poisoned. A man who stood that close to the king in public had to be handsome, cultured, knowledgeable about court procedures, able to converse with the king and advise him if asked, and totally trustworthy – after all, he was near enough to kill the king at any moment! Because of this, his was a position of great influence which could, as always, be used for good or evil. That a Jew held such an important position speaks well of his character and ability – compare this also with Daniel, who again became a most trusted servant. The Jews had returned to their own land nearly a century before but Nehemiah chose to remain in the palace – God had work for him to do there and put him in Susa just as he had Esther before, Joseph in Egypt, Daniel in Babylon.

The Hebrew month of Kislev runs from mid-November to mid-December of our calendar. Perhaps there was nothing special for Nehemiah when the day began, just an excitement that his brother was returning from a trip to Jerusalem and he would bring news of the Jewish remnant who had returned there and of the city itself, for Jerusalem has always been special to Jews wherever in the world they find themselves. Nehemiah had a caring heart, he wanted to know about his people and how they were faring. He must have been shocked to hear that all was not well, that Jerusalem itself was in a state of total disrepair and the people in trouble and disgrace. .He heard that the once-great nation was still only a remnant, that the great city was still a ruin, that the people were not living in God’s glory but in his reproach. In some ways this would not have been a total surprise – he knew that Jerusalem had been sacked by the Babylonians but 50 years later Cyrus had allowed them to return and rebuild, though the Gentiles surrounding the area had done all they could to hinder the work.

So Nehemiah would have been cut to the heart about the situation in

Israel

. Jews mourn the dead by sitting ‘shiva’ for seven days: we are told that Nehemiah wept and sat and mourned: what he had known in theory previously had now been spelt out to him as present fact. Fasting was obligatory to the Jews only once a year on the day of Atonement, but Nehemiah knew that the only way to restore the greatness of God’s people was to implore God himself, to humble himself, to fast and mourn and pray.

The book of Nehemiah both opens and closes with prayer, and there are ten other instances in the course of the book. He was a man of faith who depended on the Lord to help him accomplish the Lord’s work. Let’s look at his first prayer.

‘O Lord, God of heaven’: the pagan gods were idols on the earth, or were to be found in the streams or trees or plains: the Jewish God was in heaven and was Lord of all. He acknowledges the greatness and awesomeness of God and his faithfulness to those who do his will. He calls upon God to listen in the same way as Solomon asked the Lord always to turn his attention to the temple when his people called to him. He categorises himself as no more than a servant and a representative of

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, his servants too, and says he is praying ‘day and night’. He acknowledges that the present state of

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was inevitable because they had sinned against the Lord and what was happening was no more than Moses had been told would happen if the people were unfaithful. He includes not only himself but his family in this, he does not speak of the Jews in Israel as a separate bunch of people who have gone astray or the generation that went into exile as being the ones responsible for the state of affairs, but sees all Jews everywhere, both past and present, as equally guilty. This is exactly what we are to feel as a Church, that what one does is the responsibility of all for we are one body. Nehemiah knew this. He knew that when Achan sinned at Jericho, God stated that the children of Israel had sinned and would be punished by defeat.

He reminds God of his promise, that if his people turn again to him, he will be there for them.: he reminds God again that

Israel

are his servants and his chosen people, saved by God’s mighty power. He repeats several times that he is the servant of the Lord and asks the Lord to hear and grant the favour requested: he is confident that others are also praying for the same thing, he knows he is not alone. He probably did not have a full plan in his mind yet, but he knew that he would require the support of the king, ‘this man’ in verse 11. He asks God to move the king to hear him and respond positively. He knows that you must take a step at a time and not run ahead of God – he is not praying that he will be able to rebuild the city and the nation, just that the king will give his support to his efforts. The test he faces in talking to Artaxerxes mirrors the problem Esther had – that the king has power of life and death and was not to be addressed without express permission.

The month of Nisan is our mid-March: he waited four months before the opportunity came for him to start his plan. When we think how impatient we are – we think God is saying, ‘do this’ and we feel it must be done right away: but one of the lessons of the bible is that of waiting: as Abraham waited for the birth of Isaac, as David waited to be acclaimed King; as the psalms reiterate, be still and wait patiently upon the Lord. I am so bad at waiting, I am enthusiastic NOW and want to act while still in that state of enthusiasm; but that is not God’s way. God will prepare us and equip us so that we are fit to do his work. Perhaps the best work is not done in the heat of enthusiasm but in the calm afterwards!

It is interesting that Nehemiah says that he ‘had not been sad in the king’s presence before’. For four months he has borne the burden of Israel, for four months he has been listening to God and learning what he is to do, and has been cheerful in all his duties. It is amazing how often people allow their personal feelings, to do with their out-of-work life, to interfere with their duties and responsibilities but Nehemiah knew that the king was entitled to be served cheerfully and dutifully until God indicated to him that the time had come to put his case. He did not have to say anything, just a downcast look was enough and God prompted the king to ask the question that Nehemiah needed. And even then, Nehemiah did not launch into his story: he prayed to the God of heaven – prayed probably for the right words, the right tone of voice, but it must have been a very brief prayer - you did not keep the king waiting, when any moment he might lose his affability and turn on you. Nehemiah was enough of a friend of God to be able to breathe a prayer in a split second and to be heard. There is in this passage also such a contrast between the earthly king and the king of heaven: we do not need to wait for God to be in a good mood, or to ask a leading question, nor do we need to tremble in fear that he will refuse to listen or, worse, turn us out of his presence or have us killed. Our God is always available and knows our sorrows before we come to him with words.

There are a number of parallels between Nehemiah and Daniel. Both were Jews in an alien environment: both were men who were trusted implicitly by the foreigner they served. I was reminded here of Chris Tubby telling us how she and one of her converts were trusted to run the pharmacy of their little clinic, and to look after the money. Two people who were of a different faith from the rest of the village but seen as totally trustworthy. Daniel’s faith was irrespective of anything outside him: he was in exile, all the external props and supports of the faith were gone – the temple, the altar, the priests, the sacrifices, the offerings. This did not matter to Daniel, his faith was inside himself and totally independent of his surroundings. He was a man of adaptability- he was young when brought before the king, we are told that he and his friends were ‘gifted in wisdom, possessing knowledge and quick to understand, and whom they might teach the language and literature of the Chaldeans’. Daniel was able to learn the language but this was not considered sufficient, the King wanted him also versed in the literature, therefore in the history and culture, of the Chaldeans as well. He is even given a new name – his old one probably seeming barbarous to his new master. One thing he does not adapt to, though, is the worship of foreign gods. He is able to separate what matters deeply – his faith in his God – and what matters only in a practical way – to understand the environment that he is in and to change where change does not contradict the important principles of his life. He must live in an alien world but must never allow the dream of God’s greater purposes for Israel to die, because if he does, there is hardly anyone left who will remind him of them. It is rather like being behind enemy lines in wartime – you must assimilate outwardly so that you do not stand out into unnecessary danger but you must retain your integrity and do the job you were sent to do. Daniel’s faith grew stronger in the hostile soil – he could depend on no-one but himself and his God, no priests, no temple, no bible classes, no prayer meetings to bolster him. It took three years for Daniel’s training to fit him to go before the king, three years of perhaps wondering what God had in mind for him to do. And God was indeed with him from the first moment, when he realised that he could not partake of the food offered him by the king’s orders, which would defile him in the sight of God. We are told that God ‘had brought Daniel into the favour and goodwill of the chief of the eunuchs’ and therefore he was able to persuade this man to let him and his friends eat only those things they could accept according to the laws of Yahweh: and God made sure that they thrived on this restricted fare.

Daniel was given the gift of interpreting dreams, which further secured his position with the king. But even this was not enough to save the friends when they were reported for refusing to bow in worship the gold image and they were thrown into the furnace. And finally this convinced the king that Daniel’s God was truly great.

Daniel’s prayer in chapter 9 has many similarities with that of Nehemiah. The opening is the same – the praise of the greatness of the Lord, and a reminder of his covenant with Israel and his mercy and his love. Again, Daniel includes himself in the number of those who have strayed and sinned and gone against God’s commandments: he uses the word ‘we’ throughout, all of

Israel

, all Jews wherever they are, share in the sin of the nation. Can you imagine an ex-pat living in sunny Spain or in Bulgaria accepting that they are responsible for the state of our nation today? Do even we who live in the midst of it accept that we are equally to blame for the plight of the country? He tells God that the punishment is right and just, and in accordance with the words given by God to Moses, that if the Israelites did not obey the commandments these things would come to pass. He does not rail at God for this, he says yes, this was what we deserved, BUT all the same, we are becoming a reproach and for God’s own sake (a reminder of Moses’ argument with God), for the sake of your good name, and your righteousness, and your great mercy, hear us now and act. Not because we deserve it but because you are good.

Another great man of prayer was David. David was a man close to the Lord’s heart but he was not a paragon of virtue. He was guilty of many things, from dereliction of duty (had he been at the head of the army, as he should have been in his capacity as King, he would not have been walking on the roof, not have seen Bathsheba, not have committed adultery, not have been responsible for murder: all these things, growing greater and greater as they proceed, came from the first comparatively small failing.) David had within him not only the Spirit of God which is poured out on all his children, but the special spirit of leadership given to Moses, to the Judges, to Samuel, and I think this is the spirit he means in his prayer:’ Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your Holy Spirit from me’. He knows that God will never abandon him personally but he does not want to follow Saul into losing the leadership because of his sin. The kingship of Israel was God’s purpose for David and if he loses this, he has lost the chance of serving God in the way God intended him to serve. The whole of Psalm 51 is his prayer of repentance. This is a more personal prayer, acknowledging his own sinfulness and calling upon God’s mercy, again, not because David deserves it but because of who God is. David has come to see that sacrifices and offerings are nothing to God compared with obedience and repentance. Again, the mercy is seen as being according to God’s character, his grace, his righteousness: not something deserved or earned but a gift from God. I think sometimes we take God’s mercy for granted – if we repent, he will have mercy, and we don’t appreciate the gift he is making. It is almost as though we feel it is our right, we CAN earn it, by repentance. No, it is only God’s grace, only his righteousness, and we have to acknowledge that each time.

So, three great men of God, three great prayers, three relationships that we can learn from. All three were men who took their earthly duty seriously but did not let that distract them in any way from their duty to God. None made compromises, even those living in alien environments when it would have been easy to try and ‘fit in’, to ‘play safe’. All knew that prayer was the lifeline of their faith and were on those terms with God where they could ask and know that they would receive. Faith, they knew, was the capacity to go on believing even when the externals, the supports and props you have been used to, and maybe even your own people, are taken away. It is an inner strength, a knowledge of a reality so powerful that even the most cataclysmic outside events cannot shake it. These are the people who mould the environments they live in, rather than being moulded by them. Perhaps the exile of Nehemiah and Daniel, and the time spent in running from Saul for David, were the necessary soil for the deep faith to grow, a faith that came from deep inside and not from ritual and habit and custom, from what others expected of you. The only person these three answered to was God, and he in turn answered them when they turned to him.