Sunday Morning Greek Blog

August 13, 2024

Debunking The Skeptics Annotated Bible (SAB): Romans 1:3

Filed under: 1 Chronicles,Biblical Studies,Birth Stories,Christology,Luke Gospel of,Matthew Gospel of,Reliability of Scripture,Romans,Skeptic's Annotated Bible — Scott Stocking @ 9:49 pm
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I’m down to preaching on just the last Sunday of the month now, so I thought I’d take a stab at some apologetic articles on my off weeks and make a series out of the posts. I’ve referenced before the work of Steve Wells, The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible (SAB), in which he categorizes several different types of what he considers to be deficiencies in the biblical text like perceived or apparent inconsistencies, worldviews that would not have even been considered in biblical times, and things he thinks are ridiculous or silly. He uses the King James Version of the Bible, which is probably in the public domain at this point, so he didn’t even choose a good modern translation to critique. His criticisms reflect an extremely shallow understanding of Scripture and the nature and character of ancient texts generally, so admittedly, his work is low-hanging fruit for those of us who are Bible ninjas when it comes to defending the faith.

Having said that, then, I’ll tackle Romans 1:3 in this article (≠329)[1], but it will lend itself to debunking some of the other related inconsistencies as well.

The first is Romans 1:3, citing the KJV text he uses:

3 Concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David according to the flesh;[2]

Here’s the 2011 NIV translation of the same verse:

3 regarding his Son, who as to his earthly life g was a descendant of David,[3]

And since this is a blog about Greek, I’ll throw in the Greek text for giggles.

3 περὶ τοῦ υἱοῦ αὐτοῦ τοῦ γενομένου ἐκ σπέρματος Δαυὶδ κατὰ σάρκα,[4]

The question Wells asks here about the contradiction is: “Was Joseph the father of Jesus?” Under each entry in the index, he identifies other verses in the Bible that he has labeled with the same number and breaks the list down into the supposed contradictory answers. Interestingly enough, he seems to have his verses mixed up in the index entry, as he lists this particular verse under the “Yes” answer category, while the verses in Gospels for the birth stories of Jesus that explicitly identify Joseph as Jesus’s earthly “father” are under the “No” category.

First of all, basic common sense would leave most people to believe that “seed” is being used metaphorically here, not necessarily in reference to a biological child of the person who produced the “seed,” but more broadly to the concept of “descendant.” In fact, when the word for seed [σπέρμα (sperma), ατος (atos), τό (to)[5]] is not used to mean an actual seed of a plant, it appears in contexts where the concept of having descendants is emphasized (see, for example, Mark 12:20–22, the concept of levirate marriage). So Paul in Romans 1:3 isn’t talking about Jesus’s biological father (bio dad for you young ‘uns), but about Jesus coming from the lineage of David, through which the prophets of the Old Testament declared the Messiah would be born. Pretty straightforward, right?

But let’s not stop there, because if Paul had intended to say David was Jesus’s bio dad, he would have had a perfectly good Greek word to use, and he could have taken it straight from Matthew’s genealogy in Matthew 1:1–17, and as such, I’ll address some other contradictions (≠326 Matthew/Luke genealogy; ≠328 Who was Jesus’s paternal grandfather?; ≠261 Matthew/1 Chronicles genealogies; ≠325 number of generations) Wells identifies, the discrepancy between Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies. The Greek word γεννάω (gennaō), according to Louw-Nida’s reference, means “the male role in causing the conception and birth of a child—‘to be the father of, to procreate, to beget.’ ”[6] So this is yet another proof that there’s no need to identify a contradiction in Romans 1:3, because Paul didn’t use the same term as Matthew there.

But wait! It gets even better! While Matthew’s genealogy begins with Abraham, the father of God’s covenant people, and ends with Joseph, Luke’s genealogy begins with Joseph and goes backwards to creation and Adam, the first man (of whom Jesus is the archetype, that is, the firstborn of all creation). Matthew’s genealogy probably skips a generation here or there so he can fit it into his three “fourteen generations” pattern (by the way, 3 x 14 = 42, so Jesus is the answer to the question of “What is the meaning of life, the universe, everything?” Some of my readers will get that.). But you can trace the genealogy to a certain historical point from the end of Ruth and in 1 Chronicles 3:10–17.

The standard historical interpretation of Luke’s “alternate” genealogy is that it traces Jesus’s lineage back through Mary and not Joseph. Note that when Luke introduces the genealogy, he says “being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph” (Luke 3:23 KJV). But verse 23 is the only time we see the word for “son” in the Greek text. The rest of the genealogy is just the genitive form of the definite article, so it’s literally “Joseph of Heli of Matthat of Levi…” and so on. “Son of” can be fairly discerned from the context, but it’s possible Luke uses just the definite article to cover his bases in case someone is missing from the genealogy. We know nothing about Jesus’s grandparents on either side, so it’s possible that the simple “of” in the first instance (“of Heli”) is connecting Joseph to Mary’s parents or lineage. After all, in Jewish tradition, the child’s “Jewishness” comes from the mother.

This is just one example of the shallow and rather thoughtless and unscholarly opposition to the truth and integrity of Scripture you’ll find in Wells’ SAB. Your comments made in good faith are always welcome. If you’d like to read more critiques about the SAB, I want to recommend you to my colleague SlimJim’s blog, The Domain for Truth (wordpress.com). He is an outstanding apologist for the faith.

Peace,

Pastor Scott Stocking, M.Div.

My views are my own.

[1] NOTE: As I go forward in this series, I will “tag” the index numbers so you can easily search for the contradictions among my blog posts.

[2] The Holy Bible: King James Version. 2009. Electronic Edition of the 1900 Authorized Version. Bellingham, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.

[3] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[4] Aland, Kurt, Matthew Black, Carlo M. Martini, Bruce M. Metzger, Maurice A. Robinson, and Allen Wikgren. 1993; 2006. The Greek New Testament, Fourth Revised Edition (with Morphology). Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft.

[5] Swanson, James. 1997. In Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains: Greek (New Testament), electronic ed. Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc.; those of you who know Greek will recognize that the noun is neuter, not masculine or feminine.

[6] Louw, Johannes P., and Eugene Albert Nida. 1996. In Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament: Based on Semantic Domains, electronic ed. of the 2nd edition., 1:256. New York: United Bible Societies.

July 28, 2024

The Lord’s “Lunch”: Feeding of the 5000 (John 6:1–21)

Filed under: Biblical Studies,Christology,Creation,Exodus,Faith, Faithfulness,John Gospel of,Luke Gospel of,Mark Gospel of,Matthew Gospel of,Miracles,Thanksgiving — Scott Stocking @ 3:30 pm
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Historical Note: I preached this message at Mount View Presbyterian Church on July 28, 2024. After the service, the organist, who also manages the rotating schedule of preachers, mentioned to me that the pastor who is the moderator for the Session (church board) had preached on this passage the previous week, even though we’re encouraged to follow the lectionary, and had said the “miracle” of feeding the multitudes was that everyone shared their lunch. As you’ll read/hear in my message, I make no bones about this event being a genuine miracle, and even cited a couple instances where I’d heard this pastor’s particular interpretation many years ago, one of which was from a guest pastor at Mount View when I was in high school (yes, I remember part of a sermon I heard in high school). I had no idea she had put that idea forward when I prepared my message, although I do believe God prompted me to include my own historical experience in my message.
I was standing with my mom when the organist told me that, and they both appreciated that I defended the position that the event was a true miracle of multiplication and providence. They had never heard the “shared-their-lunch” theory before and were a little confused about that, though it’s likely some sharing did happen in such a large crowd. It’s funny but sad that Satan knows Jesus could turn stones to bread but some don’t think Jesus could create bread from nothing.
–Scott

Jesus just wanted some alone time. John’s gospel doesn’t put the events of Jesus’s ministry in chronological order, so we don’t always get the historical context. In the Synoptic Gospels, we see that Jesus was quite busy with his ministry up to this point. He was traveling around healing and working miracles, even raising the dead. He had been confronting the religious leadership, sometimes through his parables. He even settled on his 12 disciples that formed his core group.

But the “triggering” event, it would seem, was the death of a beloved family member. The story of the death of Jesus’s cousin, John the Baptist, precedes the account of the feeding of the 5,000 in the Synoptic Gospels. Matthew, Mark, and Luke seem to be making the point that this was foremost in Jesus’s mind when, as Matthew says (14:13) “he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place,” and Mark and Luke tell us that the disciples went with him.

But Jesus already had quite a following, so it wasn’t easy for him to get away from the crowds. Even though he was in a remote place, the crowd came out in droves, because they wanted to hear more, and Jesus did not disappoint. But as Jesus was wont to do, he just kept teaching because the sheep needed a shepherd. I imagine the disciples had started getting hungry and sensing the crowd’s hunger long before one of the disciples spoke up. John suggests Jesus was setting them up, as he already had in mind to do this miraculous feeding.

I think we all know what happened, but there are a few details of the story that are worth highlighting here. First of all, it’s one of the few accounts of Jesus’s ministry that appears in all four gospels. The main event of the story is the same, but there are some minor differences in the details of the story about who spoke and who acted. Some people might see this as contradictions in the biblical account, but actually it shows that there were four different eyewitness accounts and that each writer mentions specific things. For example, John says Jesus asked how they would get enough bread to feed them. Jesus likely knew that the disciples had been talking amongst themselves about asking Jesus to send the crowd away to get their own food, as in the other three gospels, but John doesn’t mention that.

The agreement among that particular aspect of the story is that Jesus and the disciples seem to have an obligation for the well-being of the crowd. But while the disciples are thinking practically and economically about a solution, Jesus is thinking miraculously and ultimately spiritually, and to a certain extent, ecclesiastically, that is, how he expects the “congregation” to act when they’re together. I’ll dive into that a little later in the message.

Mark adds what seems to be a reference to the Old Testament, just before the Jews received the Ten Commandments at Sinai. Normally we might expect Matthew to add an OT detail. Mark says the people sat down in groups of hundreds and fifties, agreeing with Jesus’s direction in John. This seems to refer to the time when Jethro told Moses that his burden as judge was too great and that he needed to delegate the resolution of disputes to capable men who could manage dispute resolution by appointing “officials over thousands, hundreds, fifties, tens.” That would make things easier for Moses to manage, as the lower officials could handle the small stuff. In the same way, the disciples would have an easier time managing the feeding of about 20,000 people (remember, the story specifies 5,000 “men”), even though at that point, the disciples still apparently had no idea how they would feed that many with a little boy’s lunch.

Now I want to emphasize here that I believe the feeding of the 5,000 was a real miracle of God’s providence for those who were following Jesus. Forty some years ago, some of you may remember the church near us that burned down (North Side??), and Mount View offered to share our building with them so they could continue to hold services. I think for a while we had separate services, then combined services in the summer. I distinctively remember their pastor speaking on this passage and suggesting that the “miracle” here was that everyone in the crowd was so inspired by Jesus thinking he could feed them with five loaves and two fish that they shared their own lunches with everyone around them. A few years later, I read that in one of my seminary text books as well. That’s a nice sentiment, but I. Now I’m relatively confident there actually was some sharing going on in a crowd that large, but if it was whole crowd, how could they have collected twelve basketfuls of broken pieces? Wouldn’t the crowd have kept their own portions for later? And the fact that the disciples and Jesus all seemed to recognize that the crowd didn’t have much food, and that they had stayed there listening to Jesus much longer than anyone had anticipated, tells me that God did indeed miraculously multiply the loaves and fishes for the crowd.

Bread was considered sacred to the Jews, so after a meal, they always had to collect any that was leftover, even if it had fallen on the ground. No five-second rule in that case! That’s the backstory behind the collection after the meal. But it’s worth talking about the baskets as well. Some of you may know that there’s also a story about feeding 4,000 people in Matthew’s and Mark’s gospels, and they picked up seven baskets after that event. The conventional wisdom is that the baskets [κόφινος (kophinos)] in our passage today were probably the disciples’ lunch baskets (perhaps because there were 12 baskets) that they carried with them when travelling, however a few sources think they may be larger. The seven baskets [σπυρίς (spyris)] in the feeding of the 4,000 story were thought to be somewhat larger, but we have no way of knowing for sure in either case. The point is, there was plenty leftover after the miraculous provision, and it’s likely that others collected the leftovers for themselves as well.

I mentioned earlier how these miraculous feeding stories tend to look forward a bit as well, both to their spiritual and practical significance. In John especially, the example Jesus sets here establishes the standard that allows him to say toward the end of chapter 6, after walking on water, “I am the bread of life.” His statement in 6:35 that “Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty” hearkens back to the woman at the well in John 4, where he says those who drink the water he gives would never thirst again. Remember, the Jews considered bread sacred, so when Jesus says he’s the bread of life, he’s saying he’s the life that comes from God and is imparted to us when we believe. Before he says he’s the bread of life, he mentions the manna in the wilderness: that’s what kept the Israelites alive for their 40-year wandering.

Additionally, you don’t need to be a scholar to see the connection with the Lord’s Supper. Jesus took the bread, gave thanks, broke it, and distributed it to his disciples. When they saw him break the bread at the Lord’s Supper, I’m sure every single one of them was reminded of the feeding miracles. “This is my body.” “I am the bread of life.” If they hadn’t already made the connection, they made it at the Lord’s Supper. Jesus would be their life, their salvation, and they were to remind themselves of that when they gathered by taking the bread and the cup. He even says, “Do this in remembrance of me.” That must have mystified some of them, because even though he had been talking about his impending death, even at the Lord’s Supper they probably didn’t realize the time was at hand. He took the sacred ritual of the Passover and redefined it around his own impending sacrifice. No longer would it be about breaking free from the bondage of Egypt over a millennium earlier; now it would be about being released from the power of sin once and for all by his death. “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.” It brings forgiveness, hope, and peace.

In a world of traveling by shank’s mare or a real mare, people took their time. That’s why we see in the early church in the book of Acts, believers are meeting together in homes and breaking bread together, both for a meal, as the disciples did at the Lord’s Supper, and for what we know as communion today to remember the Lord’s Supper and his sacrifice. The life of the early church was built around strong community bonds rarely seen today. Back then, their weekly meetings probably lasted a full day when you include the meal and whatever instruction they received from God’s word. Today, most congregations limit their services to about an hour. “Everybody comes and goes so quickly here,” as Dorothy said about Oz. Even with all our fancy technology, we still have trouble staying connected at times.

Regardless of the size of one’s congregation, it’s important that you always work to foster and maintain that sense of community. Your potlucks and quilting bees and other activities are important parts of that sense of community and your identity as a church family. That sense of community and identity helps you discover your purpose and mission as well. Never lose sight of that.

[On the audio: Extemporaneous sidebar on the Walking on the Water passage. Main point: You need to let Jesus into your boat when the storms of life assail you.]

I know some of the best times for me, especially in this past week as my daughter Erin and her husband were preparing to move to San Antonio, are when we can have a leisurely meal at home and then sit around the table and play a board game together. After having her close by for over four years, it will be a while before I’ll get to see her in person again. I will certainly cherish that time, even though I lost every game we played. That doesn’t happen too often.

In our gospel passage today, we see that not only does Jesus have lordship over the food produced on land and in the sea, but he also has lordship and authority over the weather as well by walking on water. Because all authority in heaven and earth has been given to him, he is able to be a high priest who understands our needs and strengthens us where we are weak. He is our Savior, and we praise him for what he has done and is doing in our lives.

The stories of the feeding of the multitudes are not about how Christians can feed the world, but about how God “feeds” us and strengthens us in his Word and affirms us in our salvation. God provides for us, sometimes through our own skill and labor, but other times through his miraculous provision. May we always look to Jesus for the eternal life and hope he offers to us. Amen.

Pastor Scott Stocking, M.Div.

My views are my own.

May 13, 2024

A Mother’s Courage (Psalm 1; Exodus 2; 1 Samuel 1–2)

Filed under: 1 Samuel,Birth Stories,Courage,Easter,Exodus,Faith, Faithfulness,Greek,Luke Gospel of,Matthew Gospel of,Prayer,Women in Leadership — Scott Stocking @ 8:41 pm
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Message preached on May 12, 2024, (Mother’s Day; Ascension Sunday) at Mount View Presbyterian Church, Omaha, NE. Scripture readings for the day were Psalm 1 and Luke 24:44–53 (from Ascension Thursday).

I want to read the first half of Psalm 1 again. As I read those three verses, I’d like you to think about someone you know who might fit that description.

1 Blessed is the one
who does not walk in step with the wicked

or stand in the way that sinners take
or sit in the company of mockers,

2 but whose delight is in the law of the Lord,
and who meditates on his law day and night.

3 That person is like a tree planted by streams of water,
which yields its fruit in season

and whose leaf does not wither—
whatever they do prospers.[1]

One person who fits that bill in my life is my mom, and I’m guessing that might be true for some of you as well. I think I can make a pretty safe bet that some of your kids would say that about each of you as well. You know the sacrifices you’ve made, the labors of love you’ve persevered through, and the happy times you’ve provided to give your children a loving environment in which to grow and thrive. Moms, this day is for you, and this message is for you this morning as well.

I want to look at the courage of three mothers in the Bible who faced some incredibly difficult choices, the mother of Moses; Hannah, the mother of Samuel; and Mary, the mother of Jesus. We don’t have many details about their respective backgrounds or their upbringing, but their stories were important enough to memorialize in Scripture, so they’re worth a closer look.

We read about Moses’s mother in Exodus. Moses’s mother and father were Levites, who after the Exodus would live their lives in service of the Tabernacle and later the Temple. Pharoah had given an order that all the Hebrew newborn boys should be thrown into the Nile, reflecting an ancient, barbaric practice known as “exposure.” Exposure involved abandoning an unwanted child in a remote location and letting the wild animals or nature “take its course.” In Sophocles account of Oedipus Tyrannus, such an abandoned child was maimed intentionally to make them less desirable should they happen to survive or be rescued by a more compassionate soul.

Moses’s mother, of course, was too compassionate and loved her child too much to allow something like that to happen to Moses. Even the Egyptian midwives knew that what they were commanded to do—kill all Hebrew male babies at birth—was morally abhorrent. They conspired to tell Pharaoh that Hebrew women gave birth so quickly they had no time to get to the birthing event. She tried to hide Moses for a few months, but when that became impossible to do, she followed through with Pharoah’s edict, sort of.

She placed Moses in a covered basket coated with tar and pitch so it would float on water. The word for “basket” there is the same word used for Noah’s “Ark,” תֵּבָה (tē·ḇā(h)), so there’s an obvious thematic connection there: God’s deliverance. But Moses’s mother was not interested in seeing her newborn die in the Nile. Moses’s mother knew just where to place the basket so it would float right to the spot where Pharaoh’s daughter would bathe and find him. Moses’s mother took an incredible chance at this point, a chance that one of Pharaoh’s soldier could have found the basket first and killed Moses on the spot; maybe even a chance that the crocodiles, if there were any around, would get to him first.[2] She let her child float down the river, under the watchful eye of Moses’s older sister, until Pharaoh’s daughter would find him. In case you’re wondering, yes, the Nile does have crocodiles, but it’s not clear whether they were common in this part of the Nile. I’m guessing not if it was the royal bathing site.

Most of us know the rest of the story. Pharaoh’s daughter rescued Moses from the river, and Moses’s sister was brave enough to approach her to offer the services of his mother as a wet nurse, so she got paid to do her motherly duty! Moses would eventually grow up to be educated in all the wisdom and knowledge of Egypt, making him the perfect “rebel” to lead his people out of Egypt to the Promised Land. Moses’s mother’s incredible courage to keep him alive against the wishes of a tyrant led the most significant event in early Hebrew history, the Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt.

From the time of the Exodus and entry into the Promised Land, we jump forward a few hundred years to the end of the period of the Judges. In 1 Samuel, we’re introduced to the family of Elkanah. He is an Ephraimite with two wives: Peninnah and Hannah. Elkanah had children with Peninnah, but Hannah had had no such luck, and in that culture, barrenness was the worst form of shame for a married woman. We learn in the story that Peninnah taunts Hannah relentlessly because she is barren, amplifying the shame Hannah felt. But Elkanah was acutely aware of Hannah’s shame and her desire to have a child, even giving her a double portion of the sacrificial meat after the sacrifice.

At one of these sacrificial meals in Shiloh, Hannah got up and went to pray for a child at “the Lord’s house.” Eli the priest noticed that as she prayed and wept, her lips were moving but he couldn’t hear her voice. He thought she was drunk. Hannah explained that she was in anguish, and it probably didn’t take Eli too long to figure out why, and instead of continuing to chide her for what he thought was a drunken display, he blessed her: “Go in peace, and may the God of Israel grant you what you have asked of him.”

We’re not sure of the timeline after that, but it would seem that it happened within the next year, Hannah gave birth to a son and named him “Heard by God,” which in Hebrew is Samuel. Out of her joy, Hannah agreed to dedicate Samuel to the work of the Lord when he was old enough to be weaned, and Eli took him under his wing. Hannah continued to look after Samuel every year, bringing him a new robe at each visit. Hannah was blessed with two more sons and two daughters as well.

Samuel turned out to be a shining light of integrity as a “surrogate” son in the family business of leading in the Tabernacle, especially since Eli’s own two sons were little better than scoundrels. Samuel would be instrumental in the transition from the period where Israel was led by judges to the monarchy and appointment of Saul and then David as kings of Israel. Given the character of most of the judges up through Samuel, it’s difficult to say what would have happened had Samuel, a man after God’s own heart himself, had not come on the scene when Israel went through its transition. We can thank Hannah’s courage and her fervent prayers for the birth and life of Samuel and his faithful work guiding the early monarchs of Israel into its Golden Age.

Hannah’s prayer (1 Samuel 2) after dedicating Samuel to the Lord may sound familiar to some of you. Listen to her prayer and see if doesn’t sound similar to a prayer of another mother who came on the scene about 1,000 years later:

“My heart rejoices in the Lord;

in the Lord my horn u is lifted high.

My mouth boasts over my enemies,

for I delight in your deliverance.

2 “There is no one holy like the Lord;

there is no one besides you;

there is no Rock like our God.

3 “Do not keep talking so proudly

or let your mouth speak such arrogance,

for the Lord is a God who knows,

and by him deeds are weighed.

4 “The bows of the warriors are broken,

but those who stumbled are armed with strength.

5 Those who were full hire themselves out for food,

but those who were hungry are hungry no more.

She who was barren has borne seven children,

but she who has had many sons pines away.

6 “The Lord brings death and makes alive;

he brings down to the grave and raises up.

7 The Lord sends poverty and wealth;

he humbles and he exalts.

8 He raises the poor from the dust

and lifts the needy from the ash heap;

he seats them with princes

and has them inherit a throne of honor.

“For the foundations of the earth are the Lord’s;

on them he has set the world.

9 He will guard the feet of his faithful servants,

but the wicked will be silenced in the place of darkness.

“It is not by strength that one prevails;

10   those who oppose the Lord will be broken.

The Most High will thunder from heaven;

the Lord will judge the ends of the earth.

“He will give strength to his king

and exalt the horn of his anointed.” [3]

Of course, that mother was Mary, the mother of Jesus, and her Magnificat that Luke records in chapter 1 seems to pick up on many of the themes Hannah had highlighted in her own prayer.

In spite of their very similar songs of praise to God, they had quite different circumstances in their lives when their firstborns came along. Hannah was in a committed marriage relationship. It’s not clear why she was one of two wives. If I had to make an educated guess, I’d say Hannah may have been the wife of one of Elkanah’s brothers who passed away, and through the custom of the Levirate marriage, Elkanah would have been obligated to “marry” his brother’s widow and through that marriage provide an heir for his brother, her late husband. You’ll notice that the story doesn’t make any moral judgments about the arrangement. This could explain Hannah’s earnest and seemingly anxious desire to have a son.

Mary, on the other hand, was most likely too young to have thought of herself as barren, especially since she had not formally tied the knot with Joseph at the time she learns she is pregnant with Jesus. She wasn’t asking God for children when the Gospel writers introduce us to her. In fact, having any children was certainly not “top-of-mind” for her. She is shocked but does not respond with disbelief at God’s promise to her. Even though Joseph shows concern for ending the relationship for both their sakes, so he thinks, to save face, Mary cannot escape the fact that an archangel of the Lord had revealed God’s purpose and promise to her, so she presses forward all the while anticipating what was to come.

We don’t hear anything in the Gospel accounts of Mary and Joseph during Mary’s pregnancy until we get to the birth of Jesus in the stable. Luke picks up the story just as they are headed out from Nazareth to his ancestral home in Bethlehem, even though Mary is obviously in the last month of her pregnancy. She and Joseph persevere through the most unlikely place for a baby to be born: an animal stable instead of their comfortable home back in Nazareth. But that night, the shepherds in the nearby fields found out from a heavenly host that the savior has been born, and they hurry to see him that very night in his humble digs.

But her journey is far from over. Luke tells us Jesus was presented on the eighth day at the temple and receives the two blessings from Anna and Simeon, which must have hit her hard, especially the part about causing the rising and falling of many. Matthew tells us that on the heels of that dedication that “magi” from the East come to worship him and bestow him with gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh. I’m guessing that gold would have come in handy when God warned them to flee even further from Nazareth, into Egypt, because Herod, like Pharaoh of old, had ordered all babies under two years old to be killed. They were able to return to Nazareth a few years later.

It must have been quite the challenge for Mary to watch Jesus grow up, I mean, he was the son of God. What kind of behavior would you expect from a kid who had all the fulness of deity dwelling in him? We know from the gospel accounts that Mary never seems to be too far away from Jesus throughout his ministry. Of all the people who knew Jesus and associated with him closely, Mary would have been the one to truly understand his mission, especially when he started talking about his impending death. She may not have wanted to understand, but she couldn’t deny that she did, and yet she faced each day with and for him.

Mary is the only one of the three mothers we’ve looked at this morning to see what happens to her son at the end of his life on earth. Yet her incredible sorrow and anguish at witnessing his crucifixion was transformed to inexpressible joy when she encountered him risen from the dead. I’m not sure that Mary would have picked up on Jesus hinting at his own resurrection, even after finding out Jesus had called forth the recently deceased Lazarus from the tomb.

These three mothers, whose sons had significant ministries and a crucial mission for their own times, exemplified the kind of faith and courage that earn them the designation of Psalm 1:3: “She is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever she does prospers.”

Today, let us give thanks to God for the faithfulness of mothers who stood by us and with us as we were growing and maturing. We give thanks to you who are faithful mothers who even today give comfort and encouragement to your adult kids and to your grandkids. And let us give thanks for and encourage younger mothers as they face their own unique challenges in raising the next generation. May the peace and love of God be with you all. Amen.

[1] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[2] It does seem odd that crocodiles aren’t mentioned in this story. Perhaps Pharaoh had a “Croc Patrol” to keep the river clear of them where royalty used it for bathing.

[3] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

March 24, 2024

Rigged Trial; Real Redemption (Luke 22:54–62)

Filed under: Biblical Studies,Christology,Easter,Isaiah,John Gospel of,Lent,Life of Christ,Luke Gospel of,Mark Gospel of,Matthew Gospel of,Passion,Psalms,Resurrection,Spiritual Warfare,Trial of Jesus — Scott Stocking @ 7:16 pm
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I preached this sermon Palm Sunday, March 24, 2024, at Mount View Presbyterian Church.

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“Lawfare” may be the political “term du jour” but it is hardly a new concept. The first known use of the word has been traced back to 1975, and at the time it referred to actions of an aggressor designed to try to declare military actions against them illegal by using human shields or other uses or misuses of the law to achieve military objectives. It has also been used to describe the attempts of some to question US military actions taken against terrorists, especially after 9/11. In the current climate, it refers to frivolous or unfounded legal action against those who’ve either committed no crime or whose actions did not deserve the level of retribution “the law” has thrown at them.

This doesn’t just affect political candidates or others who go against an “approved” narrative either. Some of you may have heard last week about a woman who was arrested in New York because she changed the locks on the doors of a house she owned to try to get rid of a squatter, someone who had illegally invaded her home and attempted to take possession of it by fraudulent means. The process to eject such people from a home you legally own can take up to two years in some places, and the owner is responsible for spending the money to prosecute the squatter and prove they legitimately own the home, all the while being denied access to their home. “The process is the punishment,” even if you’ve done nothing to deserve it.

As we come to our passage this morning from Luke, Jesus is being arrested after being betrayed by Judas and a violent confrontation in which Peter (at least according to John’s gospel) cuts off the ear of the high priest’s servant, Malchus. Jesus, even while under arrest, reaches out to heal the servant. Peter follows the crowd at a distance to the high priest’s home late that night. Our passage focuses on Peter’s actions outside the residence, but we’ll get to that in a bit. Luke doesn’t give us as much insight into what happened inside the high priest’s home, but other Gospel writers do. It’s there that we see some of the “lawfare” waged against Jesus.

Matthew puts Jesus before the Sanhedrin that evening, while Luke records the concluding element of the all-night trial happening the morning after. The High Priest and the rest of the council sort of back into prophesying that Jesus is the Son of God, especially with Jesus turning the tables on them in Matthew 26:64: “You have said so.” Basically, Jesus is saying that just by them entertaining the possibility that he is the Son of God, they themselves have committed the blasphemy they are accusing Jesus of. In John 11:51, we’re told that the High Priest had unwittingly prophesied that Jesus would die for the Jewish nation, so he’s again unwittingly confirming Jesus’s true nature and purpose.

Another element of their lawfare was the apparent illegality of the trial. The very judges that condemned Jesus were the same one who bribed Judas to betray him. Technically, they should have been disqualified from judging him. Jewish custom of the day, as recorded in their other writings at the time, forbade capital punishment trials from taking place after sunset. Furthermore, their customs forbade such trials from beginning on the day before the Sabbath, because their custom did have an element of compassion to it in that you couldn’t decide a capital punishment case in one day, and a unanimous verdict was considered possible evidence of conspiracy. Jesus was never given any chance to have an advocate for his defense, either, which was another violation.[1]

All of this was done to fulfill the Suffering Servant passage in Isaiah 53, especially vss. 7–8, which said:

7 He was oppressed and afflicted,

yet he did not open his mouth;

he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,

and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,

so he did not open his mouth.

8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away.

Yet who of his generation protested?

For he was cut off from the land of the living;

for the transgression of my people he was punished.[2]

One last thing about the trial of Jesus that night. Jesus quotes the Messianic Psalm 110 about being seated at the right hand of God. Psalm 110 is the most-quoted psalm in the New Testament, especially the first four verses:

1 The Lord says to my lord:

“Sit at my right hand

until I make your enemies

a footstool for your feet.”

2 The Lord will extend your mighty scepter from Zion, saying,

“Rule in the midst of your enemies!”

3 Your troops will be willing

on your day of battle.

Arrayed in holy splendor,

your young men will come to you

like dew from the morning’s womb. j

4 The Lord has sworn

and will not change his mind:

“You are a priest forever,

in the order of Melchizedek.”[3]

Psalm 110 was also a popular psalm to discuss among the early church fathers in their writings in the first four centuries of the Christian era as proof of Jesus’s messiahship and, especially as used in later parts of the New Testament, proof of his resurrection. Most Jews were not keen on having the Messiah sit at the right hand of God in heaven. They simply saw that as a reference to the authority of the human descendant of David who would sit on the throne. However, at least one prominent rabbi and his followers did use this passage and another one in Daniel to argue that the Messiah indeed was divine in nature. (For an in-depth study of this passage in relation to its use by early Christian writers, see Ronald Heine’s excellent book Reading the Old Testament With the Ancient Church (Baker, 2007) available from Logos Bible Software if you have an account with them or in ebook format through Christian Book Distributors.)

Now we know that at Jesus’s arrest, the disciples scattered, fulfilling Zechariah’s prophecy in 13:7: “Strike the shepherd and the sheep will be scattered.” Mark’s account of the arrest has a detail none of the other gospel writers have, that of a young man fleeing naked from the scene of the arrest. Some scholars have suggested that this was Mark himself, the author of that gospel. Even though the gospels say all the disciples scattered, we do know that Peter was able to follow the crowd that had arrested Jesus at a distance, which is where we pick up our main gospel passage this morning.

Now Peter knew from the Last Supper that Jesus had predicted he would deny knowing him three times before the rooster crowed but leave it to bull-headed Peter not to take heed to that, or at least, not to worry about any possible fallout from that. Or maybe it just went right over his head, thinking “Of course I won’t deny him!” The very fact that Jesus predicted that means Jesus knew his trial would be conducted illegally at night. If Jesus had predicted something like that about me, I might have been inclined to go shut myself in a cave somewhere and not speak to or be seen by anyone. But then, wouldn’t that in itself have been a form of denial? Even though Peter was arguably the most well known and the most vocal of the apostles, and thus the most recognizable, he still tried to conceal himself in a crowd outside the high priest’s home.

Sure enough, several in the crowd recognized Peter, first for his appearance and second for his Galilean accent when he protested and denied knowing Jesus. Each time someone called him out as one of Jesus’s followers, the rooster cleared its throat for that fateful crow. Had Peter somehow hoped Jesus’s prediction would be wrong? Or did Peter not realize that roosters always crow around sunrise? I don’t think the crow of the rooster was really a surprise to Peter, though. I believe he knew in his heart his denials, his lack of strength of character to acknowledge that he was a Christ-follower, were piercing his soul and conscience. Two weeks ago, when I spoke on the passage about being ashamed of Christ, I covered this, so I won’t go into again here.

However, I want to look forward a bit to see how Peter came out on the other side of this. Peter apparently had no idea what was going on with the trial of Jesus inside the high priest’s home. If he had been inside the house and had seen how the Sanhedrin was treating him, I wonder if Peter would have spoken up at that point, especially since there was no love lost between the Sanhedrin and the apostles at that point. If two people could have spoken in his defense, the whole thing might have turned out differently. But we know it wasn’t meant to end that way, because as Jesus had been telling his people and as the high priest had predicted, Jesus would have to die for our redemption.

Therein lies the irony of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus. A rigged trial ultimately led to our real redemption. Not only was the trial rigged on the Jewish side, but once the Sanhedrin had wrongly convicted Jesus of blasphemy, they knew they couldn’t be the ones to put him to death. Only Rome had the authority to do that. So when they turned him over to Pilate and Herod, did they do so under the charge of blasphemy? Of course not! The Romans didn’t care about their religious disputes. Instead, the Sanhedrin changed the charges to usurpation, that Jesus was claiming to be the king of the Jews. That, they knew, would earn him the death sentence “In the Name of Roman Injustice” (INRI, get it?). The Sanhedrin had to stir up the crowd before Pilate to the point of making him fear a riot in order for Pilate to pronounce the flogging and the death penalty on Jesus, even though the gospels reveal some hesitation on his part to do so.

Jesus was crucified shortly thereafter. The typical method of crucifixion involved breaking the legs of the crucified so they could not push themselves up to breathe, but by the time the guards had gotten around to Jesus, he had already suffocated, according to John’s account (19:31–37). The fact that they only pierced his side but didn’t break his legs[4] was a fulfillment of two prophecies (Psalm 34:20; Zechariah 12:10). The water and blood that flowed from his side was a medical indication that Jesus was in fact dead.

Hebrews 9 gives the ultimate treatise on why blood needed to be shed in order for purification to take place and a covenant to be established. In vs. 19, we’re told that a diluted mixture of the calves’ blood and water was sprinkled on all the people to sanctify them for the new covenant under the Ten Commandments. Verse 22 says that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” Jesus was the perfect, unblemished lamb of God because he never sinned. Although his body had been thrashed by a cat of nine tails whip, he had no bones broken, so he met the qualifications for the Passover lamb, which happened when God delivered the Jews from slavery in Egypt.

Here’s another connection you may not have considered. In Leviticus, Moses says that certain types of sacrifices, both meat and grain, could be eaten by the priests. When Jesus instituted communion at the last supper, he identified the bread and the wine as his body and blood. When we take communion, that is our way of connecting with the body and blood of Christ, not in the Catholic sense of the elements becoming the body and blood of Christ, but in the sense that we, like the priests, are partaking in the sacrifice first-hand. That’s why we consider communion a “sacrament,” because if we understand its true meaning and the reality behind it, we know that such an act has redemptive power for us. As one Scottish Presbyterian minister in the 18th century said when a woman who was not a member of his congregation asked if she could take communion, the minister replied, “Tak’ it; it’s for sinners.” There’s a spiritual benefit for each of us when we take communion, especially with a proper understanding of its meaning.

Getting back to Peter: he experienced real redemption in several ways after Christ rose from the dead. Jesus appeared to the disciples the very night of the day he was resurrected, and they all received the same blessing and commission from Jesus. John records his encounter with Jesus at the Sea of Galilee after Peter had apparently returned to the life of a fisherman. He asked Peter three times, once for each denial, if he loved him, and Peter emphatically said he did. Peter would go on a few weeks later to deliver the Pentecost sermon that started it all, the birthday of the church. History (or is it tradition?) has it that Peter was eventually crucified upside down on a cross because he didn’t feel worthy of the same kind of crucifixion Jesus suffered.

As Lent comes to a close this week and we embark upon the Easter season and look forward to our birthday celebration of Pentecost, let us not forget the sacrifice of our savior on the cross, and the provisions he made for us upon his resurrection and in the pouring out of the Spirit at Pentecost. We have a great Savior who has done great things for us, so let us not be ashamed to proclaim his name and his salvation to the world. Amen.

My thoughts are my own.

Pastor Scott Stocking, M.Div.

[1] See, for example, 10 Reasons Why the Trial of Jesus Was Illegal – Bible Study (crosswalk.com), BibleResearch.org – Twelve Reasons Why Jesus’ Trial Was Illegal, and The Illegal Trial of Christ | Christ.org, accessed 03/22/24.

[2] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[3] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[4] The leg bone of the Passover lamb in Exodus was not to be broken either (Ex 12:46).

Postscript: I want to include the study note from Mark 14:53–15:15 from the 2011 version of Zondervan’s NIV Study Bible, because it contains a harmonization of the various Gospel accounts of Jesus’s trials.

Jesus’ trial took place in two stages: a Jewish trial and a Roman trial. By harmonizing the four Gospels, it becomes clear that each trial had three episodes. For the Jewish trial, these were: (1) the preliminary hearing before Annas, the former high priest (reported only in Jn 18:12–14, 19–23); (2) the trial before Caiaphas, the ruling high priest, and the Sanhedrin ([Mk] 14:53–65; see Mt 26:57–68; Lk 22:54–65; Jn 18:24); and (3) the final action of the council, which terminated its all-night session ([Mk] 15:1; see Mt. 27:1; Lk 22:66–71). The three episodes of the Roman trial were: (1) the trial before Pilate (15:2–5; see Mt 27:11–26; Lk 23:1–5; Jn 18:28–19:16); (2) the trial before Herod Antipas (only in Lk 23:6–12); and (3) the trial before Pilate continued and concluded (15:6–15). Since Matthew, Mark, and John give no account of Jesus before Herod Antipas, the trial before Pilate forms a continuous and uninterrupted narrative in these Gospels.

November 12, 2023

Are You Ready for His Return? (1 Thessalonians 4:13–18; Matthew 25:1–13)

Filed under: 1 Thessalonians,Amos,Biblical Studies,Chronology,Eschatology,Matthew Gospel of,New Testament,Resurrection — Scott Stocking @ 6:33 pm
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Click the “Play” triangle above to hear the message preached 11/12/23 at Mt. View Presbyterian Church, Omaha, NE.

High school was a very important time for me with respect to my spiritual life. A lot happened in those three years in our family, the most important of which was a change I had begun to see in my mom. Without going into the “why” of what led to her transformation, she got connected with a regular weekly Bible study with other women, and I noticed a positive change in her spirit and her demeanor. That change was amplified by her sharing her renewed faith in Christ with the rest of her family, primarily by leaving little “Jack Chick” comic book tracts around the house for anyone to read.

Many of them were rather simple: short stories about someone looking for God or discovering their need for forgiveness or reconciliation, or even encouraging “right living.” But amongst those more traditional evangelistic topics, there were a few tracts that spoke about the second coming of Christ. That was a totally new concept to me, or so it seemed. I had been pretty regular in my Sunday School attendance here at Mt. View as a kid, and if we ever talked about the second coming of Jesus in Sunday School up through my junior high years, it never stuck. But now I was curious, especially because my mom had a new testimony about her own renewal.

The topic of Jesus’s second coming was the spark that started the fire for my own spiritual renewal, eventually leading up to the summer between my sophomore and junior years at my aunt’s ranch in Wyoming, where I discovered she had a whole collection of these tracts, and several copies of each to boot. That was the summer, summer of 1979, that I made my faith my own. I understood that I had a decision to make to finish the work my parents started when they had me baptized as an infant here, dedicating themselves along with the congregation to raise me in the faith.

Now I’ll admit that, in the first two years after that summer, I made the mistake that the late great preaching professor Fred Craddock warned about: I got so caught up in the second coming of Christ that I ignored his first coming and everything that went along with that. I nearly undid my renewal because I hadn’t focused on growing in my knowledge of Jesus and what he wanted from my life until that day would come. I don’t think I was alone in that, either. I remember finding a bookmark in the Zondervan store that said, “Don’t be so heavenly minded you’re no earthly good.” That kind of hit home for me.

Our passages today bring back a ton of memories from that time in my life. The world is a much different place now than it was 44 years ago. Many so-called prophecy experts or eschatologists of the day thought Russia was the evil empire, Magog of the North from Ezekiel’s prophecies, and China and Iran (remember the hostage crisis?) were the manifestation of “the Kings from the East” of Revelation 16. But it wasn’t bad enough then. Today, it seems we’ve come full circle, only this time it appears to be much worse. Some of the same players have come back to the forefront again, and we should heed the signs of the times. Let’s take a look at our passages today.

Let’s start with our 1 Thessalonians 4 passage that we read this morning. The passage describes what is popularly known as the “rapture,” even though that word never appears in the Bible. It describes a time somewhere in the future (at least from Paul’s perspective, and in line with Jesus’s own words from Matthew 24) when the world will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds, resurrecting his followers first, then “catching up” his followers who are alive to rescue them from the final judgment of the earth.

The first couple verses of 1 Thessalonians 5, if I may borrow them from next week’s passage, tell us that day will come “like a thief in the night.” Now we may be tempted to think that day will be a day like any other day in our lives. As I started writing this section of my sermon, a commercial came on for David Jeremiah’s new book on the rapture, with video clips of people going about their daily lives just “disappearing,” with their clothes on (which I thought was bit odd), with nothing spectacular going on around them. But one of the Old Testament passages for today that we didn’t read, Amos 5:18ff, paints a very different picture of that day, and actually warns against being too excited about its coming:

18 Woe to you who long

for the day of the Lord!

Why do you long for the day of the Lord?

That day will be darkness, not light.

19 It will be as though a man fled from a lion

only to meet a bear,

as though he entered his house

and rested his hand on the wall

only to have a snake bite him.

20 Will not the day of the Lord be darkness, not light—

pitch-dark, without a ray of brightness?[1]

If you’ve studied this topic in the past, you’re probably well aware of the differing opinions about just exactly when this “rapture” happens in the whole scheme of the “end times” and the tribulation. I think this passage from Amos gives a hint about when that might happen if we put some other pieces of the puzzle together as well. I don’t want to dwell on this too much, because as Jesus says, no one knows the day or the hour when that’s going to happen. But we should be wise to the signs of the time and be able to discern at least the beginnings of that final era of our mortal history.

For example, some people think that what Jesus foretold in Matthew 24 has already happened, because he says, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” The question is, does “this generation” refer to the people he’s speaking to, or is it more broadly referring to the period of the Church? Those who believe it refers to the people he’s speaking to are typically called “Preterists,” which is just a fancy word for historical. For them, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in A.D. 70 marks the final point of judgment on the nation of Israel, and that is what is described in graphic imagery in the Book of Revelation. No rapture for us then! In this view, the age we’re living in now represents the rule of God’s kingdom on earth through the imperfect church, and there will still be a final reckoning of this history when perfection comes for good.

Others think the rapture will come at the beginning or half-way through the tribulation. Some take the phrase “time, times, and half a time” in Daniel 7:25 to say that’s three-and-a-half years, half of the seven years Ezekiel mentions about the last days in 39:9. But if you look a little closer at the Daniel 7 passage, you’ll see that God’s people will be “delivered” into the hands of the enemy for three-and-a-half years before being released. This leads to the very popular “mid-tribulation” speculation about when the rapture will happen. That’s the interpretation I learned as a teenager. But if you’ve been held captive by the evil in the world for three-and-a-half years, things probably aren’t going to be “business as usual” if and when you’re freed. It is nice to think that God wouldn’t want us going through the worst of the tribulation, but I don’t think things will be “bad enough” yet by the half-way point.

The phrase “thief in the night” that both Jesus and Paul use about the second coming of Christ is found in one other place in the New Testament, and it might surprise you where. It’s found in Revelation 16:15, where Jesus says of himself: “Look, I come like a thief! Blessed is the one who stays awake and remains clothed, so as not to go naked and be shamefully exposed.[2]” Now in case you haven’t read Revelation in a while, Jesus makes that statement after the penultimate sixth bowl of wrath is poured out on the Euphrates. Remember, the sequence of sevens is seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls, so if these things represent a linear history, we’re almost at the very end of this final judgment. This begs the question: will Christians still be around through all these judgments up until the point of the final battle? What does the next verse of chapter 16 say? “Then they gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.[3]” Where is Armageddon, which is Hebrew for the Valley of Megiddo? It’s about halfway between Tel Aviv and the border with Lebanon, just north of the border with the West Bank. And immediately after that, the seventh and final bowl of wrath is poured into the air. Things that make you go “Hmmm.” I base my own personal views on the end times on this then, that the rapture doesn’t happen pre- or mid-tribulation, but at the bitter end of the world to save us from the devastating final wrath and judgment of God. That is our hope.

Now again, I want to emphasize that I don’t have any special knowledge here about these things. I’m just doing some investigative work on how the pieces of the puzzle might fit together and making an educated guess. I’m not trying to make any predictions about when anything is going to happen in the future; I’m just putting forth the facts about what Scripture says, and letting the chips fall where they may. I’m not saying I’m right and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong. I’m not that arrogant about my understanding of the timeline. But the point I’m making is that you can see how this Day of the Lord might be a dark and gloomy time as Amos prophesied. It is kind of scary, but we know for sure that God will win in the end, and in that grand thought and fact, we put our hope.

This is where our Matthew 25 reading comes in. Although on the surface this appears to be a parable about any old wedding banquet, it’s actually a parable about the final wedding banquet we’ll have in heaven when the Church is made the bride of Christ. Because the virgins don’t know when the bridegroom is coming, and they know he could come in the middle of the night, it’s important for them to be ready and have oil for their lamps so when he arrives, they can enter straightaway. If they’re not ready, they’re not getting in. There’s no turning around at that point and trying to get more of what they need to get in. Nor can anyone share their “oil” with them to help them get in, because if they share it, they might not have enough for themselves and may be left out as well.

If that sounds a bit selfish, it is, intentionally so. Each of us can, in the end, only be responsible for our own salvation and readiness, and we’d be foolish to give up that readiness for the sake of someone who wasn’t ready. God wouldn’t allow it anyway, because he judges each of us on our own readiness and faithfulness, as the parable of the sheep and goats at the end of chapter 25 suggests. Those who aren’t ready can’t ride on the coattails of those who are. Those who thought they could make excuses for not doing what God has called them to do won’t get a mulligan. When it’s finished, it’s finished, done, and over. Eternal consequences are locked in.

The Day of the Lord and the end times in general are topics of interest to many believers, and perhaps even more so in today’s climate. Unfortunately, at times they can become topics of debate as well, but we must never make one particular view of the end times a test of faith, because I believe there’s so much more we don’t know about how all that will play out. My encouragement to you, then, is to stand firm in the last days. Be ready. Put on the full armor of God as Ephesians says. Be in a constant state of prayer. Don’t neglect the fellowship with your fellow believers. As I’ve said before, we don’t know when our final day will be. Our last day could be today, tomorrow, or ten or twenty years from now. Jesus is coming! God will ultimately destroy this temporary abode of ours and establish us in his eternal kingdom, a new heaven and a new earth, in our new immortal bodies. It is and will be a place of perfection where there will be no more sorrow or shame, only joy and rest in the light of God’s glory, the light of the Lamb. Amen.

[1] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[2] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[3] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

October 29, 2023

Living the Greatest Commandments (Matthew 22:34–46; Leviticus 19:11–18; Psalm 110:1)

Filed under: Biblical Studies,Ephesians,Evangelism,Faith, Faithfulness,Leviticus,Matthew Gospel of,Passion,Proverbs,Psalms,Soteriology,Spiritual Warfare — Scott Stocking @ 9:00 pm
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Our gospel passage this morning contains the two most-quoted Old Testament verses in the New Testament. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” from Leviticus 19:18 of all places, is quoted directly 10 times, with one other allusion to it, spread across several books in the NT, not just the Gospels.

Psalm 110:1, which Matthew quotes in the second part of our gospel passage this morning, is the second most-quoted OT verse in the NT, with a total of 8 direct quotes of and another 10 allusions to the passage. But it doesn’t end there. Dozens of early Christian writers in the first 300 or so years after the birth of the church referenced the passage as well.

Jesus uses this verse twice in each of the first three gospels. The first occurrence is what we read here this morning, when he’s speaking to the pharisees during his last week before his crucifixion and claiming that he is the Messiah, son of David, that the OT points to; the second occurrence in each Gospel is when he’s defending himself before the Sanhedrin after his arrest and affirms his place as the preexistent Messiah and descendant of David. That was the statement that caused the high priest to tear his robe and accuse Jesus of blasphemy. Outside of the gospels, the NT writers and early church fathers use it to demonstrate his resurrection and appointment to the right hand of God.

You probably also noticed that Psalm 110:1’s popularity among early Christian writers pretty much forced the ecumenical councils of the day to use a form of the verse in their respective creeds; we read it every week here in the last part of the Apostle’s Creed: “He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.”

Jesus knows his day of crucifixion is coming, so he’s essentially pulling out all the stops now as far as letting people know who he is. No more hints or subtle innuendos: by citing Psalm 110:1 about himself, Jesus is making the ultimate claim that he’s the Messiah come to earth. No stone will be left unturned before he breathes his last on the cross for our forgiveness, and one stone will be rolled away when he rises from the dead for our hope of eternity.

So we can have absolute assurance that Jesus is who he says he is: To the Jews, Messiah; to the Greeks, Christ. He’s the son of God, son of Man, son of David, three descriptions of the same person. He’s the one we can put our total and complete faith in, because we know how great his love is for us. And we owe him our very lives, dedicated to living out the hope he’s given us.

This is where we back up and look at the first part of our passage today for the two greatest commandments he’s left to us. Matthew and Mark place these commandments in Jesus’s mouth during the week before his crucifixion, while Luke has them much earlier, so it would seem, as a lead-in to the Good Samaritan parable.

Because these are the greatest commandments, we must of course be careful not to let the familiarity of these verses make them “trite” to us. Many of us recognize that these two greatest commandments come from the Old Testament. The “Love the Lord you God” passage comes from Deuteronomy 6:5, as Moses begins his final sermon on the Ten Commandments, in which we hear the oft-repeated refrain to “be very careful to obey all I have commanded you.”

This particular verse underwent a couple minor tweaks as it came into the New Testament. In the original passage, Moses says “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength,” as the NIV translates it. That last phrase about “all your strength” could be translated “all your utmost.” The word translated “strength” there is most commonly translated as “very” or “great/greatly,” so it implies the best of the best of the best, the utmost of the utmost.

In our passage this morning, Matthew changes “strength” to “mind,” which is acceptable given the otherwise generic nature of the original Hebrew. Mark and Luke add “mind” to the original “heart,” “soul,” and “strength” from the Hebrew. Including the word “mind” here is most likely a hat tip to the prolific Greek and Roman philosophers, historians, and statesmen and the knowledge base they had accumulated. That doesn’t mean Jesus agreed with Greek and Roman philosophers, however; it just means he wanted his followers to have some intellectual understanding of how his teachings and way of living were different from theirs.

Now loving the Lord with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind is noble indeed, and should be first on the minds of all Christ followers. But then there’s that second greatest command, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Unlike the greatest command, which is found at the beginning of Moses’s greatest sermon, the “neighbor” command is tucked away in the middle of one of the most exciting books in the Old Testament: Leviticus, chapter 19, vs. 18.

Leviticus 19 reads very much like the Ten Commandments themselves, at least in the early going. But then beginning in vs. 13, after Moses gives the general command not to defraud or rob your neighbor, he begins to break down what that might look like in his “negative” commands. Listen to some of the context leading up to vs. 18, beginning in vs. 11:

11 Do not steal.

Do not lie.

Do not deceive one another.

12 Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.

13 Do not defraud or rob your neighbor.

Do not hold back the wages of a hired worker overnight.

14 Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God. I am the Lord.

15 Do not pervert justice; do not show partiality to the poor or favoritism to the great, but judge your neighbor fairly.

16 Do not go about spreading slander among your people.

Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the Lord.

17 Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in their guilt.

18 Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.[1]

So NOT doing these things to your neighbor, I suppose, is a passive way of telegraphing your love for them.

The flip side of this, that is, the positive way to state this, is found in other scriptures, notably Micah 6:8:

8 He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.

And what does the Lord require of you?

To act justly and to love mercy

and to walk humbly with your God.[2]

Proverbs 3:27–30 has some more sage advice about loving your neighbor with a mix of things we should and shouldn’t do:

27 Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due,

when it is in your power to act.

28 Do not say to your neighbor,

“Come back tomorrow and I’ll give it to you”—

when you already have it with you.

29 Do not plot harm against your neighbor,

who lives trustfully near you.

30 Do not accuse anyone for no reason—

when they have done you no harm.[3]

There’s no shortage of advice and commands in the Bible about how to love our neighbor. In the New Testament, there are nearly 100 verses about how to treat “one another.” If you have a concordance or good computer Bible software or Internet site that allows you to search, spend some time looking up all of the “one another” passages in the New Testament. It’s eye opening. All kinds of positive ways to love your neighbor: love, serve, greet, submit to, encourage, offer hospitality to, and so on. One interesting fact about this: the Greek word for “one another” (ἀλλήλων) in the New Testament is pronounced “all-LAY-lone”; the easy way to remember this is that “you’re never all alone with “all-LAY-lone.”

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that your quilt ministry, which we’re honoring today, is an important way to love your neighbor as well. Your painstaking efforts in cutting the pieces of fabric, arranging them in the various patterns, and stitching them together put meat on the bones of another scripture, Ephesians 4:28b: “doing something useful with [your] own hands, that [you] may have something to share with those in need.”

With all the help we have in scripture about loving your neighbor, you might think that’s always an easy task. But I think we all know better. Sometimes it’s very easy to love our neighbors; other times, there may be hurts or fears that run so deep that it can be hard to break through. There may also be times where “tough love” means we might have to separate ourselves from a situation because the pain or risk of harm is too great to ignore or too much for us to bear.

In those times, it’s good to know we have a God who loves us unconditionally and whose presence is always with us as we saw in last week’s message. But how can we as mere mortals love an almighty, all-sufficient God who has no “need” for anything from us? Just as God’s presence goes with us, God also desires our presence before him. He wants us to love and honor him with all that we are and could be, all that he’s made us to be, and all that we have, to the extent we are in-line with his commands and precepts.

Our reading from Psalm 1 this morning helps us to understand this relationship. The passage in our bulletin is, I believe, from the New Revised Standard Version. When I saw the first word was “Happy,” I actually cringed inside for a moment, because I knew most translations had the word “Blessed” for the first word. I had always figured that was the traditional word for “blessed” used by the Hebrews in their standard blessing: “Blessed art thou, O Lord, King of the Universe.” But I suspended judgment and checked the Hebrew, and sure enough, it was NOT the typical word for blessing. The word does carry the idea of blessing, but it also refers to an emotional state as well as a spiritual state. One lexicon I looked at had it translated as an exclamation: “How happy!” Eugene Peterson, the Presbyterian minister who translated the Message version of the Bible, picked up on that emotional aspect in his translation of Psalm 1, and I want to read that for you this morning. But I’ll give you a head’s up: if you’ve never read the Message translation, it doesn’t really read like a traditional Bible translation. In fact, Psalm 1 is about as far away from a traditional translation as you can get. The first phrase of Psalm 1 sounds a bit sarcastic, but it’s not intended to be. Listen, and you’ll hear why:

1     How well God must like you—

      you don’t hang out at Sin Saloon,

      you don’t slink along Dead-End Road,

      you don’t go to Smart-Mouth College.

2–3  Instead you thrill to God’s Word,

      you chew on Scripture day and night.

      You’re a tree replanted in Eden,

      bearing fresh fruit every month,

      Never dropping a leaf,

      always in blossom.

4–5  You’re not at all like the wicked,

      who are mere wind-blown dust—

      Without defense in court,

      unfit company for innocent people.

6     God charts the road you take.

      The road they take is Skid Row.[4]

That is how we love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind. We spend time with him by fellowshipping with one another on Sunday and throughout the week in our various ministries we have. We spend time in his word getting to know his precepts, statutes, and commands. We do things that bear fruit for God’s kingdom, for after all, Jesus said his followers would be known by their fruit. We “plant” ourselves in the God’s presence so he can nourish and sustain us, because that is how great his love is for us.

As the world around us continues to get scarier, with another mass shooting, a war in the Middle East that has Christians thinking about end-time prophecies and the book of Revelation again, and the general downhill spiral of morality around us, abiding in the presence of God and rekindling our love for him will become all the more important for our own spiritual security and emotional well-being. We can know without a doubt that God is with us; that’s an unfailing promise. We also know that his word will sustain us, for God’s word never returns void. Grace and peace to you all this morning. Amen.

[1] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[2] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[3] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[4] Peterson, Eugene H. 2005. The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language. Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress.

The Power of His Presence (Exodus 33:12–23; Matthew 22:15–22)

Filed under: Biblical Studies,Exodus,Matthew Gospel of — Scott Stocking @ 8:31 pm
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In mid-17th-century France, a 40-year-old peasant name Nicholas Herman of Lorraine, after spending much of his early adult life as a soldier in the Thirty-Years War, sought admittance as a lay brother among the barefooted monks in a Carmelite community near Paris. During his time as a soldier, he became disgusted with the ravages of a war in which there was no distinction made between civilian and soldier, and he felt compelled by God to seek a simpler life where he could focus more on his communion with God. He was assigned to kitchen duty and served in that role for at least fifteen years.

He had learned how to read and write, and over the years, he had written down many of his thoughts about his simple focus. We only know of him because one of the spiritual leaders in the religious community interviewed him four times and learned of the incredible wisdom and insight he had developed because of his unwavering focus on his communion with God, even, as he describes, while he was engaged in everyday work. Some of you may know of whom I speak at this point: his written work was eventually published for the world to read. In the community, Nicholas became known as Brother Lawrence, and of course his surviving work is called The Practice of the Presence of God.

The book is impressive in that Brother Lawrence, neither an educated priest nor a sophisticated politician, had insight that put most religious leaders of the day to shame. There is too much wisdom to unpack in the short time we have together this morning, but I did want to share one quote from his “First Conversation” with the Grand Vicar to the Archbishop of Paris that reveals Brother Lawrence’s insight.

“That we ought to give ourselves up entirely to GOD, with regard both to things temporal and spiritual, and seek our satisfaction only in the fulfilling of His will, whether He lead us by suffering or by consolation; for all would be equal to a soul truly resigned. That there was need of fidelity in those times of dryness, or insensibility and irksomeness in prayer, by which GOD tries our love to Him: that then was the time for us to make good and effectual acts of resignation, whereof one alone would oftentimes very much promote our spiritual advancement.”

Such words came about 2,500 years too late for the main character in our OT reading this morning, Moses. No one in the OT, not even Abraham, had quite the experience of the manifest presence of God that Moses did. Moses had spent the first 40 years of his life exposed to the best that Egypt had to offer, but he also was not untouched by the suffering of the Hebrew slaves. When he’d had enough, he killed an Egyptian and fled into the wilderness, where he, like Brother Lawrence, had the opportunity to reconnect with God.

But unlike Brother Lawrence, Moses apparently could not completely put his past behind him and focus on the power and presence of God once called. Listen the exchange God has with Moses at the Burning Bush:

5 “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” 6 Then he said, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.

7 The Lord said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. 8 So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. 9 And now the cry of the Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing them. 10 So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the Israelites out of Egypt.”

And Moses responded: “Great Lord! Let’s get started! When do we leave?”

Umm, no. Even though God had just told Moses in person, out loud he would do all the heavy lifting and all Moses would have to do is stand before Pharaoh, Moses just couldn’t take the focus off himself when he responded:

11 But Moses said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”[1]

How many of us have said at least once in our lives, “I just wish I knew what God wanted me to do”? Even though God had given him all these assurances, Moses just couldn’t comprehend that the presence of God before him and his people would be infinitely more powerful than whatever he might face standing in presence of Pharaoh. Maybe he was still afraid of Egypt. Maybe his experience in city planning in Egypt made him feel like relocating about 2 million slaves might be an impossible task. Whatever the reason, Moses was focused more on the potential troubles of what he saw around him and had a difficult time receiving God’s grace and appointment.

Fast forward through the awesome power of God displayed in the ten plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, and a solo trip to the top of Mt. Sinai to get the Ten Commandments, and by then, Moses seems to be getting a handle on the concept of the Presence of God, but he still doesn’t seem convinced by the time we get to the passage we read earlier from Exodus 33:12–23.

Let’s look a little closer at this passage and glean some important truths about living in the presence of God. First of all, when we walk in the presence of God, we can be leaders in our own way. Some of us may lead in small ways; others may have more prominent roles. Whether we’re leading one person into a deeper relationship with Christ or a community full of people to the same goal, we have the promise of God’s presence, but we need that reminder from God as Moses did here.

At first glance here, it may seem like Moses still hasn’t learned his lesson about what it means to be called by God. In Exodus 3, we saw that Moses was so focused on his own weakness that he couldn’t see that God would provide everything he needed to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. But at least here in chapter 33, Moses doesn’t completely reject the idea of continuing to lead, but he still wants someone to go with him. What he doesn’t realize, and what God affirms in vs. 14, is that God’s Presence (capital P) will go with him. Not only that, God’s presence will keep them from harm as they journey through the wilderness. The “rest” God will give them is not only the security of the Promised Land if they’re faithful to what he’s calling them to do, but rest as two million souls moving across the wilderness is no small logistical challenge!

Moses’s response to God has a twofold meaning: He acknowledges that he can’t lead two million people without God, and he seems grateful for that. But Moses also needs a visible sign from God not only for himself, but for the people as well. After all, it’s pretty easy to establish your authority over two million people if you’ve got a cloud by day leading you and a pillar of fire by night as your rear guard. Moses was one of the fortunate few who got to witness God’s glory up close and personal in the cleft of the rock. That was the boost of self-confidence he needed to continue leading God’s people.

The second thing we see in this passage is that God knows Moses by name and that Moses knows God has favored him for this task. The word for “favor” in Hebrew was translated by the Greek speakers in Jesus’s day to the word for “grace.” In other words, God gave Moses the task of leadership not necessarily because he was the best and brightest, but because he chose to gift and empower him with that task. He did nothing to earn it. This is important, because even in those few times we read of Moses missing the mark during the wilderness wanderings, God still affirms his leadership through what would become a 40-year journey for the Israelites. There was no “vote of confidence” among the Israelites if they didn’t like the way things were going. God was leading, and Moses was his earthly representative. Case closed.

The third thing we see in this passage is that Moses, like Solomon a few hundred years later, desired to be taught God’s ways so he could continue to lead and continue to find favor with God. He began to realize the importance of his role and influence in leading two million people on a journey to their new homeland. This was perhaps the largest migration of any people group at any time in history. Even today, some scientists claim they can still see the evidence of such a migration in satellite imagery of the Sinai peninsula. Moses had grasped the significance of what they were about to embark on after receiving the Ten Commandments and the instructions for the Tabernacle and its accoutrements. He asks God to “Remember that this nation is your people.” Then again, after hearing myself say that out loud, there might be a tinge of sarcasm in Moses’s voice. How many of you who raised boys ever said to your husband, “He’s your son!”

I imagine that Moses already had an idea of what he was in for after the year or two it took them to get from Egypt to Mount Sinai. His father-in-law Jethro had advised him to appoint a hierarchy of “judges” who could rule on the inevitable conflicts and issues that arise in such a large population. And certainly Aaron hadn’t helped with the whole “golden calf” incident just before this story takes place either. It seemed that even though the people had left Egypt, Egypt hadn’t left some of the Israelites. They grew impatient waiting on Moses to come down from the mountain and used some of the gold they had plundered from the Egyptians and fashioned it into an idol of gold. They had so quickly forgotten what God had done for them because they took their eyes off God and what he was establishing for his people.

This is a good place to bring in our gospel passage for today. Jesus tells the Pharisees that if the coin has Caesar’s image on it, give it back to Caesar. But if you are God’s child, be sure to give yourself to God. The Israelites forfeited the plunder of Egypt for an image that represented Egypt, and they never got that back. If they had given themselves to God in that moment, there’s no telling what blessings might have befallen them.

So what are the takeaways for us this morning?

First, know that God loves us and wants to lead us into his glory, so that we can share his love with those we encounter and point them and lead them to his glory as well. His presence goes with us. Today, we’ll likely not have a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night leading us. But we have something much more personal: God’s Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit in our lives is the confirmation of God’s presence with us. The Holy Spirit knows the heart of God and knows the love that God the Father has for his son, Jesus, and reveals to us God’s heart as we faithfully follow him and rely on him for strength and salvation.

Second, God knows each of us by name. Romans 8 says that as Spirit-led children of God, we are in fact heirs: “Heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ” because we share in his suffering that we might also share in his glory. What a marvelous thing to know the Creator of all the Earth knows each of us by name, and not only that, but knows our hearts and our hurts, and his Holy Spirit helps us get in touch and stay in touch with God even in our times of weakness. When we can’t find the words to pray, the Spirit prays for us. When we fail and fall short, the unfailing God is there to restore us. When we can’t find the words to express our joy, God puts a new song in our hearts. When we are broken, he brings healing. When we hurt someone or are hurt by others, the one who bore our hurts and pain brings healing.

Finally, stay focused on the Word of God. Moses and Solomon both asked God to teach them his ways and give them wisdom to lead. That is an attitude we all can model. God’s word never fails; it never returns void. It always accomplishes the purpose for which it is intended when spoken out loud and claimed for a promise. We may not see or understand that purpose at the time, or it may not be what we intended, but it will be effective nonetheless. Stay in community with the body of Christ as well as much as you can, especially as the days continue to become more and more evil. Only the members of the body of Christ can support the body of Christ. The world will continue to hate us, just as Jesus predicted, but stand strong in the word of God and in the fellowship of the saints around us.

Jesus is coming. If not today, then tomorrow. If not before we die, then after. We don’t know when, but Jesus does tell us to pay attention to the signs of the times. Pray for peace. Pray for safety. Pray for the triumph of Good over Evil. Pray for the lives of the innocent and oppressed as well as for the souls of the wicked and the oppressors. Take heart in knowing that God will win the victory, and that we who believe will someday be gathered to him in glory.

[1] Exodus 3:5–11. The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

October 2, 2023

Obedient Sons (Psalm 25:1–9; Matthew 21:23–32)

Filed under: Biblical Studies,Christology,Ecclesiology,Eschatology,Faith, Faithfulness,Matthew Gospel of,Passion,Prophet,Psalms,Repentance,Soteriology,Spiritual Warfare,Work — Scott Stocking @ 10:54 pm
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Message preached October 1, 2023, at Mt. View Presbyterian Church, Omaha, NE.

What does it mean to trust someone? How does it affect your life when you either learn that you can trust a person, especially someone who might be new in your life, like a new significant other in the life of your kids or grandkids? What does it feel like when someone violates your trust?

Our reading from Psalm 25 this morning lets us know that we can put our trust in God, even in the face of our worst enemies. One thing that is striking about Psalm 25 is that it begins and end with David’s concern that he not be put to shame. In a culture that valued honor above all else, shame could be devastating to someone personally, professionally, and even spiritually. David says the surest guarantee against shame was to put his trust in the Lord. But again, what does that look like? David paints a pretty good picture in Psalm 25, so let’s take a look at that.

First we see that David’s trust involves putting his hope in the Lord. That “hope” in God gives David the confidence to know his enemies will not defeat him. Psalm 25:3 has one of the two negative statements about David’s enemies: they are treacherous without cause, and because of that, they will suffer the social stigma of shame.

But David also shows us the path to avoid shame: He asks God, by his personal name “Yahweh,” to teach him about and guide him in his divine paths. In David’s day, pretty much all he had to go on for spiritual guidance was the Torah itself, the first five books of the Old Testament, and perhaps a prophet or a seer. He didn’t have all 66 books of the Bible like you and I have to keep us on the straight and narrow. David most likely had read the Torah himself a few times during his kingship; his many psalms that he wrote offer ample proof of how well he knew the Torah.

He also asks God to remember the good and forgive the bad. He first asks God to remember his own character, his mercy and his love for his creation. Then he asks God to forget, and essentially forgive, his own sins and shortcomings. But then he asks God to remember him as a person who can’t survive without God’s love.

Verses 6 & 7 here give us a nice concise pattern for a quick prayer should we ever need to utter one. Acknowledge God for who he is and what he’s done; cry out for forgiveness; and ask him to remember us, just as the thief on the cross would do 1,000 years later. The word “remember” here should not be overlooked, since it’s use three times. In the Bible, when God remembers, he acts. So when he remembers his mercy and his love, he shows his mercy and his love. When he remembers us, he loves us and reassures us of our place in eternity with him.

As an aside, there’s another application of that word remember as we celebrate World Communion Day today. What do most communion tables say? “In remembrance of me.” So when we partake of communion later, let us not only remember what Christ has done for us, but act on it by sharing it with others and recommitting ourselves as his followers.

In the last couple verses of our Psalm reading today, David again reminds us of God’s goodness and guidance in the lives of those who humble themselves before him.

These principles from this first part of Psalm 25 tie together our two gospel stories we read this morning. The first passage is an actual account from the life of Jesus as he encounters the Pharisees. The second is a parable targeted at the Pharisees.

The first story takes place the next day after Jesus has made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Do you remember what the first thing Jesus did was after his triumphal entry? He entered the Temple courts and threw out the money changers! And what did he say when he did that? “My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers,” bringing together two quotes from Isaiah 56:7 and Jeremiah 7:11. Because Jesus’s true father is God himself, and the temple is God’s dwelling place on earth, the Temple is also Jesus’s birthright home. He is the earthly steward of the Temple, not the priests or the religious rulers. Jesus’s first act after entering Jerusalem was to establish his authority over and ownership of the Temple as his rightful home. This sets the stage then, for day two, when the chief priests and the elders of the people ask Jesus where his authority comes from.

It’s interesting in this passage that these religious leaders don’t want to engage Jesus on the Scriptures he cited when clearing the temple. The religious leaders are evidently well aware that they’ve been using the temple as an excuse to place a financial burden on the people. Instead of addressing that fact, they try to do what? They try to assassinate his character! Sound familiar? But Jesus, ever the shrewd one with the religious leaders, comes back with a question of his own, which puts them in a pinch. Either way they answer it, they know they’re in trouble of losing their respect and power with the people. Jesus had already said that John represented the return of Elijah, so that put him above the religious leaders in the eyes of the people. If John’s authority was from God, the religious leaders should have believed him. If it wasn’t, the people knew better and would most likely rebel against the religious leaders. Only a nonanswer could save their skins in the short run: “I don’t recall.”

Because the religious leaders couldn’t answer Jesus’s question, which was a perfectly legitimate response in Jesus’s day according to the rules of rhetoric in Greek culture, Jesus deferred the answer to his question as well. Of course, Jesus had already demonstrated his authority at the Temple the day before, but he had also been demonstrating it all along with his healings and miracles he’d done in full sight of the people and the religious rulers. Any attempt to damage Jesus’s character would result in the same backlash to the religious rulers as either of their answers about John the Baptizer would have. Jesus’s response, then, actually helps the religious rulers save face as well.

Jesus was obedient as a son to his Father by defending both the honor of the Temple and his own honor as the true image of God on earth. In the second story from the Gospel reading today, a parable, we have two sons who would in that culture be expected to do their father’s will when asked. The first one says no, but then later reconsiders and decides to go anyway. The second one says he will go, but he never does. The first and I think most important point from the parable is that God expects us to do his will. There’s really no hiding from that.

At first glance, you might think the parable is about keeping your word to do what you promised. But then, if the son who said he wouldn’t go never actually went, would he really deserve anything for keeping his word if he didn’t do his father’s will? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? But by the same token, the son who said he would go but didn’t is in a bit of double jeopardy. Not only has he not kept his word, but he’s failed to do his father’s will as well.

The point of the parable, then, is not how or when you do God’s will, but THAT you do God’s will. Jesus goes on to continue the comparison to John the Baptizer’s ministry that he began in the first part of our Gospel reading. The religious leaders had not heeded John’s warnings to repent, but the “tax collectors and the prostitutes” did believe him and they repented, thus gaining access to the kingdom of God. Their past didn’t matter. God accepts those who humbly come to him in repentance seeking forgiveness.

But the more amazing thing is that, even after the tax collectors and sinners began to repent and turn back to God, the religious leaders still refused to repent themselves! They could see the work of God happening right before their eyes, but they couldn’t bring themselves to believe it. Jesus says earlier in Matthew that his followers would be known by the fruit they bear. Those who do his will bear good fruit. Those who do not bear no fruit or bad fruit.

It’s not clear why the religious leaders didn’t see the importance of John’s (and Jesus’s) message of repentance. The biblical story is full of examples from the patriarchs and other men of faith who repented and went on to do great things for God.

Abraham took Sarah’s slave as a second wife and had a child by her, but God still allowed the line of his chosen people to descend from Sarah.

Abraham and Isaac both lied to kings about their respective relationships with their own wives, but God continued to propagate that family line as his chosen people.

Moses directly disobeyed God’s command, yet God still allowed him to finish his task of leading the people to the doorstep of the Promised Land.

David committed adultery and had the husband of the woman killed in battle, but God still used him to lead Israel to greatness and write numerous inspiring Psalms that are still with us today.

Solomon had hundreds of wives and concubines, yet God still allowed his wisdom to survive the ages in Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon.

In Isaiah’s day, Hezekiah repented while Jerusalem was under siege, and he witnessed the miraculous fatal judgment upon 185,000 of Sennacherib’s soldiers overnight.

Every single one of Jesus’s disciples, with the exception of John, abandoned him on the night of his arrest, and Peter denied knowing him, yet all except Judas were restored to leadership status by Jesus after his resurrection. Peter went on to preach at the birth of the church on Pentecost. The teaching of the apostles was the standard of the early church according to Acts 2:42.

Paul persecuted the early church and tacitly approved of the stoning of Steven, yet God used him to spread the Gospel to the Gentiles, and his letters form a significant portion of our Scriptures today.

Jesus never promised that the path of following him would be without struggle and effort, failure and heartache. When he says, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light,” we can’t forget that we still have a “yoke” on; there’s still fertile ground to plow, and that takes some measure of strength and effort. In researching this passage, I came across an anonymous Jewish parable that the rabbis used to teach a similar point to this one. It goes like this:

The matter may be compared to someone sitting at a crossroads. Before him were two paths. One of them began in clear ground but ended in thorns. The other began in thorns but ended in clear ground….

So did Moses say to Israel, “You see how the wicked flourish in the is world, for two or three days succeeding. But in the end they will have occasion for regret.” So it is said, “For there shall be no reward for the evil man” (Proverbs 24:20)….”You see the righteous, who are distressed in this world? For two or three days they are distressed, but in the end they will have occasion for rejoicing.” And so it is said, “That he may prove you, to do you good at the end” (Deuteronomy 8:16). (Sifre to Deut. 53).[1]

So following God may have its thorny patches in the beginning, but when we get to the end of the road, the path is clear and welcoming. But if we try to go our own way, thinking that might be the easier way, and never get on the right path with God, we can only expect trouble in the end. The tax collectors and prostitutes realized they were on the wrong path and changed their ways and their destination. I know many of you have been on the right path, and you’ve experienced your thorny times, but you are stronger, wiser, and more dedicated to God for that because you know his is and will continue leading your through it. Your obedience will yield a great reward. I would encourage you to remain firm and steadfast on that path.

So we see how the truths of Psalm 25 play out in these two stories from the Gospel of Matthew. If we put our trust in God and allow him to guide us, even through the most difficult times, we will know his reward and his glory. I pray that each of us here will continue on that straight and narrow path that is the road to eternal life. Peace to you all. Amen.

[1][1] Trans. Jacob Neusner, Sifre to Deuteronomy, vol. 1 (Atlanta: Scholars, 1987), pp. 175‒76.

Kingdom Equity (Exodus 16; Psalm 145; Matthew 20:1–16)

Filed under: Biblical Studies,Christology,Ecclesiology,Eschatology,Exodus,Matthew Gospel of,Psalms,Thanksgiving,Work — Scott Stocking @ 10:03 pm
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Message preached September 24, 2023, at Mt. View Presbyterian Church. Joel Brady helped me with the sketch at the beginning of the message; I screwed up the most important line of the sketch!

What are the consequences of grumbling against God? How does God respond to us when we think he hasn’t been fair to us?

In Exodus 16, the Israelites are on their way to Mount Sinai, when the naysayers had finally had enough of the nomadic desert life and complained to Moses that they weren’t back in Egypt sitting around pots of meat and eating their fill. God, being somewhat tolerant of their frustration and their trouble adapting to their new nomadic lifestyle, promises to give them some meat that night, then rain down bread from heaven in the morning.

That night, God provided them a “harvest” of quail for their meat. Then in the morning, when the dew dried, there was a bunch of white flaky stuff on the ground, and it wasn’t snow. The people, through Aaron, asked Moses about it. Here’s what that exchange might have been like:

Aaron: “What’s this white stuff, Moses?”

Moses: “What’s-it.”

A:“Yeah, Moses, what’s it called?”

M: “Yes, that’s what I told you, what’s-it.”

A: “When did you tell us? You’re just repeating our question back to us.”

M: “Just now. What’s-it’s what it’s called.”

A: (chidingly) “Moses, you’re stuttering again. Stop playing games.”

M: “I told you, the white stuff is called what’s-it.”

A: “That’s what we’re trying to find out! What’s it called?”

M: “Yes.”

A: “What’s it on the ground?”

M: “Everywhere you look.”

A: (frustrated) “GRR!”

M: “Bless you, Aaron. You speak Hebrew. The Hebrew word for “What’s-it” is “manna”!

A: (loudly) “Then why didn’t you say that in the first place! Ugh!” (drop script and storm off to your seat).

Thank you, Joel, for helping out with that. Even before the Israelites got to Mt. Sinai, God was already at work showing his people how he would care for them in the journey ahead. When the manna came each morning, everyone was able to gather as much as they and their family needed, and no more. Except on Fridays, when the “super-manna” came that would keep an extra day through the Sabbath.

At that time, the manna was intended to be a short-term solution for traveling through a deserted wilderness. The journey probably would have only taken them a few years had they not rebelled against God when they spied out the land in Numbers 13. But even in Exodus 16, Moses or perhaps Joshua, as they’re putting the finishing touches on the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, can’t resist putting a little reminder in at that early point in the story that the Israelites would go on from there to eat manna for the next 40 years. Perhaps it’s a sarcastic reminder to the Israelites that their stubbornness and rebellion didn’t start with the scaredy-cat spies, but much earlier with the with this rebellion in the desert.

If there’s a bright side to 40-years of wandering in the wilderness, it would have to be that the Israelites were truly a free people in those 40 years. They ruled themselves based on God’s divine leadership. Sure, it must have been boring after a while, wandering here and there as God led them, but at least they had a long stretch of freedom as wanderers. They had sufficient food; their sandals and their clothes never wore out (Deuteronomy 29:5); and they knew exactly which way to go and when because of God’s miraculous manifestation in the pillar of fire by night and the cloud by day.

The other part of the bright side is that the peoples in the region began to realize how powerful this nomadic group of Israelites had become, and actually came to fear and respect them. Yet like most of us do, even when things seem to be going well with us, we can get bored and find a reason to grumble, an excuse to stray from God’s path, a reason to look back on “better days,” or at least that’s what we tell ourselves they were. Even though God had given them everything they needed in that time, I’m sure once the new generation began to settle in the Promised Land, they found that settled life much more desirable than their desert wanderings.

Our reading from Psalm 145 today brings to the forefront of our hearts and minds the great works that God has done as a preventive measure of sorts from grumbling about our current situation. The remedy: never stop recalling and recounting the great works of God and all that he has done for us. Tell the stories to your kids, your grandkids, and your great grandkids. Meditate on the greatness of God and his works. Sing about them with a loud voice. When we remember the goodness and greatness of God, any reason we think we may have to grumble pales in comparison.

Fast-forward to our Gospel passage today. We find yet another group of people ready to grumble. This time, we have a parable, or at least, it starts off like most parables of Jesus: “For the kingdom of heaven is like…” We’ll do well not to lose sight of this being a parable about the kingdom of God. It is NOT intended to be a command on how employers should pay their employees! Sorry, folks, but the CEO isn’t taking a pay cut, and you’re not getting a big raise. If this were really about employers and employees, then of course the workers who worked the whole day and got the same pay as those who only worked an hour or two would have every right to grumble. A denarius, after all, was considered a day’s wage in that time.

The parable uses the setting of the vineyard, which is a standard metaphor for the Jewish nation. The workers’ job is most likely to harvest the grapes, and it would seem that time is of the essence, as the owner of the vineyard must keep going back to the marketplace to get more laborers, even up to eleventh hour, one hour before quitting time. We shouldn’t read too much into the number of times the owner has to return to find laborers. One of the key points of the parable is found in this: the work of harvesting souls for God’s kingdom is a continuous process, and it’s never too late to stop harvesting. This doesn’t mean that the owner didn’t know how many laborers he needed; from a practical standpoint, I think it’s a safe speculation that he needed to space out the labor force for a variety of purposes, and each group may have had different tasks throughout the day.

Another point of the parable that may be obvious to most of us is that, since it’s really about the kingdom of God and not about how long you work, the perfect reward of heaven doesn’t have any kind of system of tenure. The one who’s been a saint all their life receives the same reward as those who come late to the kingdom of heaven. It’s interesting that the owner starts with the workers hired last when he pays them. Had he started with those hired first, they may have never known that those who were hired last got the same pay as they did! But then Jesus wouldn’t have been able to make his point about equity in the reward of the kingdom.

“The last will be first, and the first will be last,” then, is not a statement about flipping the rankings in the kingdom of heaven; it’s an affirmation that there are NO rankings in the kingdom of heaven. Everyone is on a level playing field. Your reward is the same as the apostle Paul, Paul’s helper Timothy, any of your former or current pastors, and a pre-teen who has just made a commitment to follow Jesus.

The final and related point here is that the owner of the vineyard never failed to keep his promise. He promised to pay the first workers a denarius, and that is indeed what they got. When he hired the later workers, he said he would pay them “whatever is right.” From a strictly business perspective, if you’ve got a deadline to meet and you don’t have enough help to meet it, the owner’s perspective is going to be that the value of the late laborers increases the closer the deadline looms. If the grapes need to be picked by the end of the day so they don’t start spoiling on the vine, the owner could lose a substantial amount of his investment. So paying the last laborers the same as the first is a sign of his great appreciation for their last-minute efforts, and he probably still made a profit even though everyone got the same daily wage.

As I said above, it’s never too late to stop working for the kingdom of God to “harvest” the souls who are ready to come into his kingdom. As the coming kingdom gets closer every day, the urgency to get God’s word out and change hearts for his kingdom becomes greater and greater. As Timothy says, God desires that all people come to the knowledge of his truth. That can only happen if each one of us does our part to share the love and hope of Jesus with the world.

The biblical story never hides the failings of God’s people. We see everyone for who they are: they find redemption for their fallenness and go on to do great things for God. When they think God is not being fair about what they receive from him, God reminds them, sometimes gently and sometimes more severely, that he has been and always will be their Jehovah Jireh, or Yahweh Yireh as the Israelite would say: The Lord is my Provider. When they try straying from God’s path of righteousness, God reminds them that he is their Yahweh Nissi, The Lord is my Banner.

Paul reminds believers in Galatians 3:26–29 that there are no worldly distinctions in Christ: 26 So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, 27 for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.[1]

The kingdom of God is for all who will come willingly to him, regardless of race, ethnicity, age, gender, or their level of knowledge. Let us go forth from here today and be a people who would shine God’s light through our words and our lives so that the world might know the love of God.

[1] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

August 4, 2023

The Everyday Kingdom of God: Minor Parables of Matthew 13

Filed under: Biblical Studies,Ecclesiology,Evangelism,Faith, Faithfulness,Matthew Gospel of,Psalms — Scott Stocking @ 10:22 pm
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I preached a version of this message at Mt. View Presbyterian Church July 30, 2023. I modified a portion of the message to include more context about the major parables in Matthew 13 for my presentation of the message the following Sunday at Peace Presbyterian, which is what I’ve posted here. The recording is from Mt. View.

NOTE: The main text of the message is supplemented with two apologetic footnotes addressing issues that Stephen Wells cites in The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible (SAB). Specifically here, I address his comments about the size of a mustard seed and his assumption that Matthew 13:35 is misquoted from the Old Testament reference, Psalm 78:2.

When I was a student in seminary, my preaching professor assigned us what I thought at the time was a very unusual book for preaching class. We had to read Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days, a fictionalized story about the town the author grew up in in Minnesota. My preaching professor was big on pastors being able not just to handle God’s word correctly and accurately, but to be able to relay the message of God’s word in stories that churchgoers might remember better than a Bible verse or passage. Being a “meat and potatoes” kind of guy, I was at first a little leery about straying too far from a strict exegesis of God’s word.

But as I began to look more closely at the Gospels in seminary, I began to see how Jesus used stories, in the form of parables, to describe in memorable terms for his listeners what the kingdom of God is like. Now having grown up in the church and going to Sunday School most of my childhood, I had already heard most of the parables, so I kind of knew what they were. I even had come up with my own parable, probably sometime in my high school or early college years. Wanna hear it? It kind of follows one of the parables we read from this morning’s text.

The kingdom of heaven is like a bowl of popcorn. Some kernels never feel the fire of God’s word and remain untouched. Others open up a little, but they’re afraid of too much exposure and never experience their fullness. But those who open themselves completely to the fire of God’s word burning in themselves let his fullness fill them, and they add flavor to the world.

I know, it’s corny, right? Okay, I got my dad joke out of the way.

You might recognize the name Asaph as one of the authors of several Psalms in the Old Testament. In one of his psalms, Psalm 78, he prophesied that God’s messenger would come teaching in parables:

1 My people, hear my teaching;

listen to the words of my mouth.

2 I will open my mouth with a parable;

I will utter hidden things, things from of old— [1]

3 things we have heard and known,

things our ancestors have told us.

4 We will not hide them from their descendants;

we will tell the next generation

the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord,

his power, and the wonders he has done. [2]

One of things I think this psalm suggests is that there would come a time for the Jews when they would begin to lose track of their stories of faith. To a certain extent, we see that happening in the Gospels on the one hand with how the Pharisees and Sadducees respond to Jesus, but on the other hand, with how Jesus chides those religious leaders.

There are strong undertones in the Gospels that the Jews were not only feeling the tension of Roman oversight, but also that they were feeling the pressure of an increasingly legalistic form of Judaism. They were weighed down with its laws and requirements. That’s why Jesus said earlier in Matthew that his yoke was easy and his burden was light. He had come to give them eternal hope and some much-needed earthly rest from those burdens.

The religious leaders, it seems, had become so full of themselves with their knowledge of God’s laws and the “hedge” they had built around it with their oral tradition that they forgot how to relate to the people. This is why, Matthew earlier in chapter 13, quotes Isaiah 6:9–10, implying that he’s talking about the religious leadership of his day:

You will be ever hearing but never understanding;

you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.

For this people’s heart has become calloused;

they hardly hear with their ears,

and they have closed their eyes.

Otherwise they might see with their eyes,

hear with their ears,

understand with their hearts

and turn, and I would heal them.[3]

The pharisees couldn’t even understand the stories at first, until they began to realize that Jesus was talking about them in some instances!

The average Jew was ready for a refresh of Judaism. When Jesus came doing miracles and teaching in parables, it seems that was just the thing the Jews needed to have their faith and hope renewed. Matthew packs several of Jesus’s parables in chapter 13 here. Just to recap briefly, the first parable Matthew records is arguably the most familiar to many believers: the parable of the seed cast on the four soils. In a nutshell, Jesus is saying there are four responses to my teaching: Some people will ignore it because they have no interest in it. The second group immediately and happily intakes it, but they have no foundation for it to thrive, so it never really takes hold. The third group might investigate it and even live it for a while, but when they experience trouble, they return to their old ways. Finally, there are those who become fully invested in God’s word and integrate it into their daily lives. Four of the five parables we’re looking at a little closer this morning are about the people in that last group.

The first of our parables this morning is that of the mustard seed. This is a one-point parable, the point being to plant the seed. We don’t need to try to figure out who the man (or woman) is who planted the seed or whether they reference anyone specifically. We don’t need to try to understand what or where the field is. Jesus has already explained that in the other parable from chapter 13 that we didn’t read this morning, the parable of the wheat and tares. We don’t even have to know what it tastes like when added as a seasoning to food. None of those details are important.

As the parable says, the mustard seed is the smallest seed known at the time.[4] That seed will grow into what is technically an evergreen shrub, but it happens to look more like a tree. We should take note here that Jesus doesn’t say it’s the largest tree, but that it’s the largest of “garden plants” in someone’s garden. I believe Jesus uses this particular parable to describe the physical size of the kingdom of God compared to its humble beginnings, especially in the Church era. It’s a parable about the outward manifestation of the kingdom of heaven.

As much as the parable of the mustard seed is about the external manifestation of the kingdom of God, the parable of “hiding” (ἐγκρύπτω engkryptō) or mixing the yeast in the dough is about what the kingdom of God does in each of us. Again, there’s no reason to discern external, real-life references to people or places with the elements of the parable. Nor should we try to interpret what the expansion of the dough with yeast might mean. The singular point here is what happens when we “hide” God’s word in our hearts; it works itself through every part of our lives eventually, in our bodies, our minds, and our hearts and souls, so that we might know the full redemption awaiting us in eternity.

Now the next two parables again each make a singular point; only the characters are different. In the parable of the treasure hidden (κρύπτω kryptō) in the field, (and take note that we see the word “hide” again; same root word as in the parable of the yeast—it’s not an insignificant repetition), Jesus is talking about what the kingdom is worth to those who’ve invested their lives in it. As with the first two parables, the details are irrelevant here: Jesus doesn’t intend us to question the motivation of the man who found a treasure in someone else’s field. We shouldn’t make judgments about that, because we’re not even told if the man had a right to be in someone else’s field.

The parable immediately after that one about the merchant looking for the pearl of great price speaks to the broad expanse of God’s creation. The merchant seemingly has a singular goal here, finding the pearl of great price. As with the hidden treasure parable, the point of these is not the actions of the individuals mentioned or who they might be specifically. Nor is the point that only one individual in each parable gets the kingdom to the exclusion of all others. The point in both of these “value” parables is the value of the kingdom and the desire to have it at all costs. Anyone can find the treasure if they search long enough for it. It’s not reserved for any special class or group of people.

The final parable of the net is a little more complex than the other four we’ve looked at this morning. The net lets us know that God will gather all creation to him in the final judgment. The fact that Jesus mentions “all kinds of fish” here is a bit unusual, since other fishing stories usually just refer to “fish.” The word for “kinds” is the same word that can be translated “nation” or “people” of a certain nationality or ethnic background as opposed to any random person. In the parable, the fishermen keep the good fish but throw the bad (σαπρός, sapros) ones away. The word for “bad” there means “decaying” or “rotten” and is used to describe “bad” fruit in Jesus’s teaching on trees and the fruit they bear. But when Jesus talks about the allegorical equivalent to the fishermen, the angels, he says the angels throw the wicked (i.e., the bad fish) into the fire. That’s a graphic image of the final judgment of humanity.

This parable is nearly identical to the parable of the wheat and tares from earlier in chapter 13. These two parables, the net and the wheat & tares, have always impressed me as lessons for Christians to accept those we live with and work with and not pronounce any kind of ultimate judgment on those who do not follow Jesus. This acceptance should not be confused with tolerance. Christ still wants us to bear witness to his saving grace even to those who are in a state of unbelief or rebellion against God. Our job is not to judge, but to share the truth of God’s word and not only hold our ground in the spiritual battles we may face daily, but to gain ground so we can push back against the evil around us. God will make the final call on each person’s eternal fate. Our job is to be faithful with how God has called us to serve him and NOT to play God ourselves.

Jesus’s use of parables is radically counterculture to how the “official” Jewish religious rulers of the day taught. Those religious rulers taught rules and regulations, laws and statutes. That did have a purpose, but without stories, the Jewish people were getting lost in a growing set of requirements that was difficult to keep up with. He showed us that when we share the word of God with others, his kingdom grows. When we hide his word in our hearts, we grow. He also showed us that of all the things we pursue in this world, even billion-dollar Mega Millions jackpots, the kingdom of God is the greatest and most rewarding treasure we could find and possess. Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other good things you worry and fret about will be added to your life. Amen!

[1] Countering SAB on Matthew 13.35. It is difficult to make an argument that the New Testament “misquotes” an Old Testament passage, especially when the speaker may not have been using the original language the Old Testament was written in. The Greek of the Septuagint (LXX) for first part of Psalm 78:2 is identical to Matthew’s first line. The second part of the verse, though, uses different words in the New Testament, but the sense of the phrase is still the same. Here they are for comparison:

LXX (Logos version) of Psalm 78:2: ἀνοίξω ἐν παραβολαῖς τὸ στόμα μου, φθέγξομαι προβλήματα ἀπʼ ἀρχῆς.

UBS 4th Ed. of Matthew 13:35: Ἀνοίξω ἐν παραβολαῖς τὸ στόμα μου, ἐρεύξομαι κεκρυμμένα ἀπὸ καταβολῆς [κόσμου].

The reason for the difference may stem from the theory that Matthew originally wrote his gospel in Aramaic, so the translation into A.D. first-century Greek may not have followed the Septuagint. It’s also possible that the meaning of some of the Greek words in the LXX had changed significantly in the 200 or so years leading up to the NT times, so Matthew had to choose a different word.

The Hebrew word translated προβλήματα (from which we get the English word “problem,” and which is not found in the NT) in the LXX is either translated with a form of that word or the Greek word from which we get “enigma” (αἰνίγματα). The Greek word used in Matthew’s passage (κεκρυμμένα) means “what has been hidden,” so that certainly fits the sense of “enigma” or “problem.” The NT rendering is essentially a dynamically equivalent translation of the LXX version.

One minor point here: SAB says Matthew’s misquote is of Psalm 78:2–3, but only vs. 2 is quoted.

[2] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[3] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

[4] Countering SAB on the size of the mustard seed in Matthew 13:31. While the mustard seed is definitely not the smallest seed known to us today, this does not take away from what Jesus is saying. First, the seed is planted in a garden that would have been home to vegetable and herb plants, practical things the growers could use for sustenance. While the seed of an epiphytic orchid may be the smallest known seed today (according to what SAB claims, anyway), it was not something that would have been planted in a vegetable garden.

Second, the word for tree (δένδρον) is used because the variety of mustard plant that grew in that region would have grown to a height of about 4 feet by the time it produced the seed pods, much larger than any of the other plants in the garden, but it was classified as an evergreen shrub. It would have been large enough for birds to perch (κατασκηνόω) in. The word doesn’t necessarily mean to make a nest. It implies a temporary residing place. In fact, it comes from the same root word used in John 1:14 to describe Jesus making his “dwelling” among us.

Getting back to the epiphytic orchids: if you do a Bing search asking “Where are epiphytic orchids found?” you will find that they’re found in tropical rainforests growing on top of other plants, thus the name (epi = upon; phytic = plant; Greed roots, of course). They are, apparently, the smallest seeds by weight. Again, calling on Bing, ask “What is the smallest seed in the world?” and you’ll get the answer Aerides odorata, an orchid. However, the information says there’s even a smaller seed than that, about 1/4th the size (0.05 mm vs. 0.2 mm). A simple check of the American Orchid Society (www.aos.org) reveals that these orchids are not native to the Middle East and would probably not have been known to Jesus’s rural and agrarian audiences.

The bottom line is, Jesus used a well-known seed as an object lesson, something everyday folks would know about. It wouldn’t do him any good in his teaching to call on his omniscience and explain that halfway around the world, there’s a seed y’all have never heard of that’s the smallest seed. It’s the ratio that’s important here: the size of mature plants is not proportional to the size of their seeds. The mustard seed wins the prize for the smallest seed that produces the largest plant, relatively speaking.

So once again, we can dispatch SAB’s criticism as uninformed and ignorant of the sociocultural context in which Jesus lived, taught, and interacted with his neighbors.

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