Theology, Biblical | Sunday Morning Greek Blog

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
Tags: 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Amos 5:18-24, Daniel 7:25, Day of the Lord, End Times, Ezekiel 39:9, Matthew 25:1-13, Mid-Tribulation Rapture, Post-Tribulation Rapture, Preterist, Pretribulation Rapture, Proper 27, Rapture, Revelation 16:15-16, Second Coming of Christ, Tribulation

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:

¹⁸Woe 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.

¹⁹It 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.

²⁰Will 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.

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October 29, 2023

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

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:

⁸He 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:

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

when it is in your power to act.

²⁸Do not say to your neighbor,

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

when you already have it with you.

²⁹Do not plot harm against your neighbor,

who lives trustfully near you.

³⁰Do 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.

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
Tags: 2023 Proper 21, Authority of Jesus questioned, John the Baptist, John the Baptizer, Matthew 21:23-32, Obedience, Obedience as sons, Parable of two sons, Psalm 25:1-9, Sifre to Deuteronomy

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.

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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
Tags: Equal Pay, Exodus 16, First will be last, Galatians 3:26-29, Grumbling, Last will be first, Manna, Matthew 20:1-16, Psalm 145, Vineyard workers

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: ²⁶So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, ²⁷for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹If 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

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:

¹My people, hear my teaching;

listen to the words of my mouth.

²I will open my mouth with a parable;

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

³things we have heard and known,

things our ancestors have told us.

⁴We 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 1/4^th 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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July 22, 2023

Counting the Days: Acts 10 and Jewish Time References

Filed under: Acts,Biblical Studies,Chronology,Ecclesiology,Evangelism,Prayer,Reliability of Scripture,Textual Criticism — Scott Stocking @ 11:32 pm
Tags: 384, Acts 10:30, Biblical time references, Cornelius and Peter, Gentiles, How did Jews count days?, In three days, On the third day, SAB, SAB Contradiction #384, Skeptic's Annotated Bible, Steve Wells

In this post:

I address discrepancies between the NIV (2011) and its precursor, the TNIV vs. the NIV (1984), ESV, NLT, and several other translations regarding how many days passed between Cornelius praying for someone to come to his home and Peter’s arrival in Acts 10:30.
I also briefly address a couple ridiculous comments on this passage by Steve Wells in his Skeptic’s Annotated Bible (SAB) that smack of cultural insensitivity and reveal that he missed important contextual clues in analyzing the passage.

The Background

Our Saturday morning men’s group at the church I attend has been reading through the New Testament following the scheme in Tyndale’s The One Year Chronological Bible. We’re not reading through it following the calendar; we’re only reading it on Saturday’s together, so it’s been a slow process, but helpful in getting the big picture of Scripture, especially as it related to the parallel accounts in the Gospels.

This morning we were reading in Acts 10, Cornelius’s plea to God for someone to come explain the Gospel more fully to him and his household in Caesarea and Peter’s response to that call. In Acts 10:30, the NIV (2011) says this:

³⁰Cornelius answered: “Three days ago I was in my house praying at this hour, at three in the afternoon. Suddenly a man in shining clothes stood before me.^[1]

No sooner had I finished reading this, several men in the group spoke up and said their version said “Four days ago.” In the grand scheme of things, this little discrepancy doesn’t have a lick of theological impact on the Bible or on any of our lives, for that matter. But it does present itself as a teaching moment on how the first century believers counted time, so I wanted to share a brief insight on this.

The first part of Cornelius’s response in Greek looks like this, followed by my literal translation:

Ἀπὸ τετάρτης ἡμέρας μέχρι ταύτης τῆς ὥρας ἤμην τὴν ἐνάτην^[2]

From the fourth day until this hour, being the ninth [i.e., about 3:00 pm]

The phrase in Greek that I have translated “From the fourth day” is somewhat idiomatic, and it does not actually contradict other translations directly, and can in fact be shown to represent the narrative in chapter 10 about the event. I’ll get to that in a moment, but I want to show that the crucifixion story may lend itself to such a discrepancy if we don’t understand how the Jews count.

Counting the Days: Jewish Reckoning of Time Forward

Most of us know that Jesus died on a Friday afternoon and was raised on Sunday morning. His prophecy about himself is consistent that he would die and rise again “three days later.” But if we think about in how we moderns look at that, we might come up with two days. The time period between Jesus death and resurrection was less than 48 hours, that is, less than two full days. But for the Jews, Crucifixion Day was Day 1, even though the day was more than half over by that time. Interestingly enough, Jesus died at 3:00 pm on that Friday according to Mark’s Gospel. The Sabbath (and the next day) would begin at sundown that evening, so all of Saturday is silent to us in the Scriptures. That was Day 2. But by Sunday morning, Day 3, sometime after the sun had set and Sunday had begun, Jesus had risen and was no longer in the tomb. From our perspective, we might say, “But Jesus only died two days before he rose!”

When Jesus speaks of rising again, the Gospel writers are not consistent with the temporal preposition they use, even within the same Gospel. Some have “in (ἐν) three days,” while others have “after (μετὰ) three days.” There was even one occurrence of διὰ (“through”) being translated as “in.” The first preposition, although commonly translated “in,” can also mean “within three days” or “when the third day arrives.” So Jesus rising on Day 3 of his crucifixion and burial fits perfectly in that scheme. The same goes for “after.” “After the third day dawns, I will rise again.” The third preposition, found only in Mark 14:58 in these parallel passages, implies that “during” that three-day period, he will rise, similar to a meaning of “within” from the first preposition. Therefore, there is absolutely no contradiction here with how the events unfolded and Jesus’s prophecies about himself.[3]

Counting the Days: Jewish Reckoning of Past Time

Getting back to the Acts 10:30 passage now, it should be easy to see why the discrepancy exists among the various translations. To make it clear how time transpires in this passage, let me put it in “weekly planner” format, and for ease of argument, we’ll take Day 1 as Monday (thanks to my friend Jerry who pointed the textual clues out during our discussion):

Monday, 3:00 pm. Cornelius is visited by an “angel of God” (Luke’s words) while he’s praying, or at least in a prayerful state of mind. (Acts 10:3; see also 10:22 for the servants’ description as a “holy angel,” and 10:30 for Cornelius’s own statement that he was praying when he had the vision.)

Tuesday, noon. One of Cornelius’s soldiers and two of his servants are approaching the city; Peter goes up to the roof to pray, gets hungry, and sees a vision. (10:9)

Evening: Cornelius’s men are guests of Peter that afternoon and overnight. (10:23a)

Wednesday morning: “The next day Peter started out with them….” (10:23b)

Thursday, 3:00 pm: “The following day he arrived in Caesarea” (10:24, 30).

In our modern parlance, if we were speaking on Thursday about something that happened on Monday, we would most likely say “Three days ago.” But counting backward in this story follows the same principles as counting forward in the crucifixion story. Thursday is the fourth day since Cornelius had his encounter with “a man in shining clothes,” the being Luke described as an angel in the opening paragraph (I’ll come back to that point in a minute). When the Greek text says “From the fourth day,” Cornelius is counting Thursday as Day 1, and Monday as Day 4 in the past.

The other interesting bit about this opening phrase in vs. 30 is that the participle for “praying” is in the present tense. Because Cornelius uses the “from…until” construction in what he says, it’s quite possible he’s not only saying that he was praying when had the vision on “Monday,” but that he’s continued praying “until” the time Peter arrives, fulfilling his prayers.

Wells’s Absurd Absurdity

For whatever reason, Wells, in his SAB seems to think it’s funny that Cornelius, a Roman gentile described as a devout man of faith and prayer, would receive a visit from an angel telling him how he can learn more about what the death and resurrection of Jesus means. Not only that, he’s told to reach out to Peter, who was the leading apostle at the time. (See his sidebar comments throughout chapter 10.) Cornelius is getting first-class service, and Peter is getting a lesson on what the next step of his ministry will be: reaching out to Gentiles, especially in the area around Jerusalem and Capernaum.

He also seems to think it’s funny that Cornelius refers to the angel as “a man in shining clothes.” In context, Luke knows what Cornelius saw and has the cultural and religious background to interpret it. The servants, who may have been Jewish or at least Samaritan, would have also recognized who Cornelius saw. But as a Roman Centurion, Cornelius may not have had the frame of reference to comprehend what he had seen. Additionally, the story about Paul’s encounter with a bright, heavenly light and the voice of Jesus on the road to Damascus may have reached his ears already, so perhaps Cornelius thought this was something similar. Maybe he didn’t know if it was an angel or Jesus himself, so he offers Peter a “just-the-facts” description of what he witnessed. Such cultural insensitivity toward a man who came from a pagan background into faith is just downright mean and nasty on Wells’s part.

Conclusion

As I said above, the issue of whether the passage should be translated “three days ago” or “four days ago” is extremely minor in the grander scheme of biblical inerrancy and translation fidelity. But I do hope you found the discussion enlightening. I’d love to hear your comments.

Peace to all!

Pastor Scott Stocking, M.Div.

My opinions are my own.

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

^[2] 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.

[3] This also debunks Steve Wells’s contradiction #384 in his SAB. The “false witnesses” are not “false” because they supposedly made up something Jesus never said; they’re false because Jesus wasn’t speaking literally of the physical Temple made of stones and timber, but of the temple of his own body. They’re false because they tried to twist his words.

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July 10, 2023

A Childlike Faith in a Patient God (Matthew 11:16–30)

Filed under: Biblical Studies,Evangelism,Faith, Faithfulness,Matthew Gospel of,Psalms,Soteriology — Scott Stocking @ 8:12 pm
Tags: burden is light, John the Baptist, John the Baptizer, Matthew 11, Psalm 145, rest for your souls, revealing the father, yoke is easy

Sermon preached at Mt. View Presbyterian Church July 9, 2023. Click above to hear the audio recording.

How patient is God?

We’re not sure how long Adam and Eve had been in the Garden of Eden before they took a couple bites from the forbidden fruit, but upon that violation of the only prohibition he’d given Adam and Eve, God moved rather swiftly. There was no, “Oh, they didn’t really understand. Let’s try this again.” Or “You know, I must have made that fruit just too irresistible for them; it’s my fault.” No, when Eve and Adam committed that first sin, the damage was done. The veil was broken that protected them from the knowledge of evil. They had their chance to know only life with God, and if they had chosen that route, the goodness they would have lived in would have never had anything to contrast itself with. God banished them from the garden immediately.

Then, after Cain and Abel had grown up, Cain being the firstborn of the first created, he decided he didn’t like how God preferred Abel’s offering to his, so he murdered Abel. Again, God dealt swiftly with it, but did not give Cain the death penalty he deserved. Instead, the Scriptures say God marked Cain somehow so people wouldn’t kill him. But Cain had caused a bigger problem that would establish an undertone throughout the OT: the curse of the firstborn. With the possible exceptions of Abraham and Noah (we don’t know their full genealogies), the firstborn in most of the major biblical stories are often bypassed for the continuation of God’s kingdom and the lineage of God’s one and only son, Jesus.

God must have turned on his patience after the Cain and Abel incident, because we don’t really hear of any judgment of God type events until we get to the flood in Genesis 6, 1,656 years after Adam and Eve were created if we’re to take the genealogies in Genesis at their word. God’s judgment is a little less swift as the story moves on. God allows Abraham to negotiate with him over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. God tolerates Abraham’s and Isaac’s deceptions about their respective lies about their wives to Pharaoh and Abimelek. God sends ten plagues over the course of a couple years, it seems, to try to get Pharaoh to change his mind about enslaving the Hebrews. And God uses a prophet to remind David of his sin with Bathsheba, a sin for which he could have been put to death, instead of dealing with him directly at the moment of his moral failure.

This is why David can write what he did in Psalm 145:

8 The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love.^[1]

We all know that children require patience, a TON of patience! But sometimes we have to act quickly to protect them from danger. Maybe they’re getting too close to a hot stove or aren’t watching what they’re doing playing in the front yard near the street. No time for patience in some of those situations. But many more times, teaching a child how to navigate the world around them can be filled with a lot of trial and error, bumps and bruises, and scraped knees and elbows. At some point, they have to learn to walk on their own, ride a bike on their own, feed themselves with a spoon and fork, and other “big kid” stuff.

In our gospel passage this morning, we have an interesting analogy that both Matthew and Luke use about Jesus and John the Baptizer. The first-century readers of this gospel would have understood the pipe and dirge references as part of a children’s game. They would have a mock wedding or funeral and try to get people to participate, but no one was responding to them. The pipe referred to the mock wedding ceremony, and the dirge referred to the funeral, of course.

It was a simple game, really. All you had to do was show up and listen to the ceremony and enjoy or take comfort in the company of others, because that’s what the cultural custom told you to do.

John the Baptizer fasted quite often, so the dirge represented his ministry. Many followed him but not many listened to him, and those who didn’t or who were critical of him missed the message that the Messiah had indeed come. Jesus’s ministry was represented by the pipes, the wedding ceremony. Jesus used the wedding ceremony as parable of his own ministry elsewhere in the gospels, when he chides those who were invited but did not come to a wedding feast. The children playing these games had a childlike faith that people would follow along in their “game.”

Jesus had many followers and curiosity seekers as well but he was disappointed that many people did not take his message to heart and believe, especially from among the religious ruling class of his day. The problem wasn’t the general population, so much. They longed to be free from a legalistic Judaism that was crushing their spirit and making them fearful of “outliers” like John and Jesus. The problem was that both Jesus and John represented a challenge to the power of the religious leadership by the number of followers they were attracting, so like any politician threatened with the prospect of losing power or influence, they found a way to play both sides of the coin.

“John has a demon!” they cried, because he fasted and only ate locusts and honey.

“Jesus is a glutton!” “Jesus is a drunkard!” they cried, because he ate and drank with the outsiders and the outcasts, the sinners and tax collectors.

Our gospel reading skips over a few verses in Matthew where Jesus mentions several towns where they had ample opportunity to repent and believe in God. He even says his hometown of Capernaum will fare worse than Sodom in the final judgment. The people are seeing miracle upon miracle from Jesus; they’re hearing incredibly insightful and liberating teaching from Jesus; but these towns could not bring themselves to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah.

Our passage picks up again with Jesus praising God for revealing the mystery of heaven to “little children.” The term “children” there most likely refers to toddlers, three- and four-year-olds. Not only that, but he emphasizes that God was pleased to reveal his purposes in that way. God doesn’t require us to be intellectual superstars when it comes to being a Christ-follower. We don’t have to know the right doctrines or even be able to explain them perfectly. His main goal for us is that we receive the love and forgiveness he’s offered us through Jesus, to return that love to him out of gratitude, and to share that love and good news with others. Nothing else should be a test of faith for us.

Most children have an innate desire to attach to a grown-up who loves them, cares for them, guides them into right behavior and thinking, and teaches them the things they need to know to survive in life. It’s a matter of simple trust for them. That’s how God wants us to come to him. When we come to him without all the worldly pretense we’ve developed over the years, we, like a child, can see the true character of our heavenly Father. He reveals himself to us, sometimes in ways we’d never imagine.

The Jews in Jesus’s day were burdened with many legalistic requirements that the rabbis had implemented to help keep the people from sinning. It was a “hedge,” as they called it, around the law. It was possible to violate the hedge a little and not sin; but they valued ritualistic purity so much, they wanted to ensure there was no trace of doubt of anyone’s purity. It was a difficult system to live under, because you could suffer disheartening short-term ostracism for not strictly adhering to the Law.

Jesus is out to change that conception, though. He says:

28 “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”^[2]

Jesus wants to change the system that had become bloated with legalism over the centuries. Much of that may have been well-intentioned when implemented, but taken all together, it had become something quite burdensome to keep. Jesus wants to make it simple again. “Rest in me,” he says. “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Jesus will teach us the true way to be a child of God, a Christ-follower. He will rescue us from our weariness and our burdens. Amen to that!

The apostle Paul seems to have wrestled with that quite a bit as well. I believe he understood God’s patience when it comes to our own response to God. But Paul also recognized we have an internal struggle sometimes, and we have to be patient with ourselves as we grow into that simple, childlike trust in God’s goodness and grace. He exemplifies that in Romans 7, where Paul seems to be having a little argument with himself: “¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ¹⁶And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me.^[3]” Paul recognizes his own need not only for patience with himself, but patience from God as well as he fights a constant internal battle with his fleshly desires.

Before I wrap this up, I do want to return to our reading from Psalm 145:8–14 and hit a few high points from that passage. I think it puts a nice bow on what it means to have a childlike faith in God.

When we’re saved by grace, Paul says in Ephesians 2:10 that “We are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works that God prepared in advance for us to walk in.” He may have had Psalm 145:10–12 in mind when he wrote this:

10 All your works praise you, Lord;

your faithful people extol you.

11 They tell of the glory of your kingdom

and speak of your might,

12 so that all people may know of your mighty acts

and the glorious splendor of your kingdom.^[4]

Jesus calls us to be light and life in this world. He’s empowered us to do that by imparting the Holy Spirit to us and making us righteous through his sacrifice on the cross. Again, it’s an easy burden from the Savior; certainly easier than trying to live life outside of the hope, healing, and forgiveness he brings. Just as we take joy at the innocence of children as they play their childhood games, so God wants us to experience the joy we can have by trusting in him.

But Jesus also realizes we may miss a step sometimes. His yoke is on us, not to enslave us, but to guide us on a straight path. Psalm 145:13b–14 reassures us that, when we stray from God’s path, he’s ready and willing to lift us up and put us back on the straight path:

The Lord is trustworthy in all he promises

and faithful in all he does.

14 The Lord upholds all who fall

and lifts up all who are bowed down.^[5]

May the Lord lift us up, sustain us, and bless us as we learn to walk in his will each and every day with the simple faith of a child. 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] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

^[5] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

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June 28, 2023

A Plentiful Harvest (Matthew 9:35–10:23)

Filed under: Biblical Studies,Christology,Christology,Evangelism,Hebrews,Matthew Gospel of — Scott Stocking @ 10:25 pm
Tags: cultural decay, culture wars, Fishing, guide, Matthew 9:35-10:23, Matthew 9:35-10:8, persecution, sheep, sheep and wolves, wolves

Click above to listen to the message.

My brother and I went on a fishing trip a few weeks ago up to South Dakota. We went through an outfitter, which meant they provided a boat for us with a guide who knew where to fish for the walleye we were targeting. Now I hadn’t been fishing for about 15 years before that, and that had only been at Louisville Lakes down by the Platte River with my son. So you might imagine I was pretty grateful to have a guide. Not only did the outfitter provide the boat and driver, but the fishing poles and the bait as well.

But it didn’t stop there. Our guide knew where the fish were biting. We had to go about 10 miles down from Chamberlain where we launched, and we hung out there until the three of us hit our limit. Our guide also baited the hook for us every time. If we caught a fish, we’d get to reel it in ourselves, which of course is the most exciting part. The guide, however, would always take the fish off the hook for us, put it on a “marker” or hook if it was a keeper, and placed it in the water storage compartment in the boat.

Afterwards, the guide wasn’t done. He even cleaned the fish for us, put it in Ziploc bags, and kept it in a freezer for us until we were ready to go home. All my brother and I really had to do was show up and reel in the fish. That’s my kind of fishing!

Now you probably know where I’m going with this. When Jesus called his first two disciples in Matthew 4:19, Simon Peter and Andrew, he said, “Come, follow me, and I will send you out to fish for people.” Now of course, we have to be careful about carrying this metaphor too far. The endpoint of the metaphor is that we need to gather people into the kingdom.

In our gospel passage today, Jesus switches up the metaphor in those last few verses of Matthew 9 from fishing to farming. Verse 35 reads almost like a summary of what Jesus’s ministry had been like up to that point, which is a nice transition into chapter 10, where get a formal introduction to Jesus’s 12 chosen harvesters: the disciples, or apostles if you will. One for each tribe of Israel, as it were.

Now to put a little more meat on the bones here, let’s quickly review what Jesus had been doing since he called his first two disciples, at least from Matthew’s perspective. He’d preached the longest sermon we have recorded in the Gospels in chapters 5 through 7. In chapter 8, he healed a man with leprosy, a centurion’s servant, and Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, along with many others. He talked about the cost of following him, so that those who chose to do so knew what they’d be signing up for.

Later in chapter 8, he calms the storm at sea, cast out demons from two men, and in chapter 9 he forgives and heals a paralyzed man, raises Jairus’s daughter from the dead, and heals a woman who’d had a bleeding condition for 12 years. And to put the icing on the cake, he heals two men of their physical blindness and a man who couldn’t speak because he was possessed by a demon. In the midst of all that activity in chapter 9, Jesus also calls Matthew out of his tax collector booth to follow him and answers a theological question on the side about fasting.

Now Matthew makes it sound like all these events leading up to our passage of the day could have happened in somewhat rapid succession, perhaps covering a time frame of three to seven days or more. Matthew’s rapid-fire collection of stories about Jesus set the stage for us about the scope, breadth, and depth of the challenge of “fishing for men.” Any disciples who’d been with Jesus up to that point could recognize this was not going to an easy road to walk down.

But with Jesus, it would not be so hard as they might imagine. We only need to jump ahead one chapter to see that Jesus says his yoke is easy and his burden is light. Just like my brother and I had a guide to help us on our fishing trip, Jesus and his heavenly father have already done much to prepare the fields for the harvest. And the more workers they have for the harvest, the easier the task becomes.

A poll by the Pew Research Center in March of this year, as you might expect, showed church attendance dropped off slightly over the pandemic. Here’s a summary of what the poll said:

“The poll found that the share of U.S. adults typically attending religious services at least once a month dropped from 33% in 2019, before the COVID-19 outbreak, to 30% in 2022. About 20% of Americans say they now attend in person less often than they did before the pandemic.”[1] According to the same article, the largest drop by demographic was among Black Protestants: the percentage attending at least once per month was down 15 percentage from pre-pandemic levels, from 61% to 46%. A pastor friend of mine has said for several years now that only about 20% of Omahans attend church on Sundays.

Now the survey didn’t go into what the causes of that were. But the point is that there are a lot of people out there who aren’t going to church, and many of them need not only the hope we have in Jesus but also the friendship and fellowship we have with one another in the name of Jesus. But over the years, I’ve noticed that among people who do go to church, they increasingly say they’re going there not necessarily because of the denomination of the church or what “brand” of Christianity they practice; they go and keep going when they feel a sense of connection with others in the church.

One of the things they beat into our heads in seminary was that, when you have a new person or family come into your congregation to “check it out,” if they don’t form any significant relationships within the first one to two months there, they’ll probably not come back. They may agree 100% with your doctrine, but if they’re not connecting with others, they’re not sticking around.

The author of Hebrews hints at this 10:24–25:

²⁴And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, ²⁵not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.[2]

I spent most of my pastor career in small rural congregations much like Mt. View here. They have very traditional worship, usually have an active core of people, and typically draw an older crowd, because the young people are always looking for something new and exciting. Their attention spans are shorter than ever these days. In some cases, those smaller congregations actually have a significant role or mission in their community or that their members are involved in. That’s a beautiful thing!

Larger churches may have fancier worship with a full band and lights and big video screens and other fancy tech, but they don’t stay big because of all that. They stay big because they’ve found success in connecting with people and connecting those people to other like-minded people. They typically have a large small-group network where members get the bulk of their spiritual support. It’s challenging enough for a full-time pastor to manage a congregation of about 50 to 100 parishioners. It’s quite another thing to manage and maintain a congregation of 2–3,000 people. They just can’t do it on their own, obviously. That’s where the small groups fit in. The leaders of the small group I’m in at my church have turned over the membership in their group several times over in the 12 years I’ve been there. That’s because their small group members go out and start their own small groups. Before the pandemic, they would have an annual “reunion” of those who’d been in their small groups over the years. That would usually draw about 30 to 50 people.

Getting back to our gospel passage today: Jesus understood that dynamic of the small group, which is why he chose his own small group in Matthew 10. He needed a group of disciples he could train so that when he was gone, the church would have established leadership at its birth on Pentecost. Not only does he train them, though, he gives them authority to do the miracles he himself was doing. In other words, they had a drawing card that would attract people to the good news: not just in words, but in miraculous deeds as well.

He tells them to go to the Jews first, because they were the ones who had known and clung tight to the hope of a coming Messiah all those years. And the most challenging part: he tells them to go out in faith and not to take any money or extra clothes. That had to be scary. When people go out today to plant a new church, they have a whole big plan of where’s the best spot and what their trajectory would look like even before they hold their first worship service. But Jesus wants them to trust him and, in reality, the power of the Holy Spirit, who was already starting to work in the hearts and minds of the disciples, even though he hadn’t come in all his fullness yet.

He also says to seek out a worthy person wherever they go and stay with them for a few days. That’s an important note there I want to emphasize: If you want to grow the church, do everything you can to attract quality people who will do the hard work of building the framework for success. Sure, we can welcome anyone who comes through our doors, but not everyone is going to be a leader. When you find those with leadership potential, do everything but kidnap them to help attract people to the kingdom.

The last section of our passage this morning is a warning that is becoming more and more relevant for Christians today. Let’s look at that again:

Jesus says his disciples are entering into a danger zone when he sends them out. “Sheep among wolves”; floggings; arrests and depositions before the highest rulers in the land; family betrayals; and universal hatred toward them. What Jesus is saying here isn’t political. After all, Jesus told his disciples to go to the Jews first, and this is how the Jews, their own flesh and blood, would treat them. It really didn’t have much to do with Roman rule, although the Romans would have been suspicious of large crowds, like those at Pentecost. In the dictatorship Rome had become under a Caesar who considered himself divine, people tended to toe the line out of fear and survival instinct. You’ll notice that Jesus never once spoke out against Roman rule.

But in a free society like ours, where traditionally there has been no attempt to force any unity of thought or behavior, we have become either accepting or tolerant of people’s free will choices, some of which have no respect for God, his followers, or his creation. Jesus is speaking of a godlessness that has infected the Jews, and that such godlessness will lead to hatred and persecution. Are we not beginning to experience that godlessness today?

Just like Jesus, I’m not trying to be political here. What I’m talking about isn’t politics, it’s paganism at best, and at worst, it’s just plain evil. America has lost track of 85,000 unaccompanied minors who’ve crossed into our country in the last two years. We know many of these children are being trafficked for labor and sex, which is unspeakable. Children are exposed to sexualized content, and not just in books, at a young age, something that would have been considered child abuse 20 years ago. And the operations that are being performed on some kids who haven’t even reached puberty yet that will scar them for life? That was unthinkable even 20 years ago. All in denial of the fact that God created two biological genders, each with their unique and divine purpose and form. How have we gotten to this point where we’ve objectified children and gender for godless ideologies? The church must be a light in this darkness.

And yet, when we speak out against such evils, the wolves come after us. We’re cancelled, banned, brought before judges to defend what we believe. It is happening just as Jesus said it would for those who would proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is near. But Jesus doesn’t expect us to sit back and take it. He says we need to be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves. Keep your head on a swivel. Don’t worry about the material things; God will provide for your needs as you find people worthy of your greeting and your peace. He also promises the words to say when dragged before rulers and authorities. The Holy Spirit will speak for you and through you in those moments if you stand firm.

The promise in Matthew 10:22 is still true today: “The one who stands firm to the end will be saved.” That sounds like what Paul says in Ephesians 6: “Put on the full armor of God so you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.” It’s a spiritual war we’re fighting, not a political one. We need spiritual armor and spiritual weapons. The armor of God is the armor that God himself is said to wear in the Old Testament. I know I got a little heavy there, but know that your own ministry efforts here are winning battles as well, especially by bringing warmth and comfort to those who need it most through your quilting ministry and the other ways you reach out to the poor, lonely, and needy.

In reality, we can only influence one heart at a time. Where we plant a seed of hope, someone else may come along and water it and cultivate it. But in all cases, God causes the growth. Let us remain steadfast and faithful in the ministries that God has called us to so that we can continue to spread the good news that the kingdom of heaven is near. We are his hands and feet, may the Lord bless us to his service. Amen.

[1] Poll: Religious service attendance a bit down after pandemic (omaha.com)

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

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May 17, 2023

Life in the Spirit (John 14:15–21)

Filed under: 1 John,Biblical Studies,Christology,Ephesians,Greek,John Gospel of,Life of Christ,New Testament,Pneumatology,Soteriology,Textual Criticism,Theology, Biblical — Scott Stocking @ 11:35 pm
Tags: 1 John 2:1-2, Acts 17, Advocate, Areopagus, Ephesians 6:10-14, Holy Spirit Advocate, John 14:15-21, Sixth Sunday of Easter

Message preached on Sixth Sunday of Easter 2023 (May 14) at Mt. View Presbyterian Church. I added some technical details about the text for the blog article that I did not cover in my sermon.

Acts 17 is perhaps the most significant event we have recorded from the life of Paul in terms of his ministry. No, that chapter doesn’t recount any of his appearances before Roman rulers in defense of his faith and ministry. Rather, Paul attends a meeting of philosophers at a place called the Areopagus in Athens. It is safe to say that the Areopagus represented the “melting pot,” as it were, of worldviews and ideas on the meaning of life and purpose of humankind. Two of the more prominent philosophies mentioned in Acts 17 are Epicureanism, which originally focused on pursuing happiness, and Stoicism, which originally focused on living according to nature and suppressing one’s desires. Now I say “originally,” because by Paul’s time, Epicureanism had become more focused on sensuality than happiness, and Stoicism had just made its adherents prideful.

But we also learn from Acts 17 that most of the Roman gods and goddesses, or at least the Roman versions of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses, were still quite popular still in the day, so much so that Paul comments on and is distressed by the number of idols and other symbols of pagan worship that fill the city. Apparently, the Athenians were even afraid of leaving out a forgotten deity, so they had a statue with the inscription: “to an unknown god” (Acts 17:23).

Paul would use that statue as an object lesson to introduce these philosophers to a God they knew virtually nothing about: the God of the Jews, Yahweh, the Lord of Hosts, the One True God. Paul spoke of the resurrection of Jesus, a truly foreign concept to them. He spoke of the Creator God who “does not live in temples built by human hands.” Paul’s message certainly stirred the philosophical pot of thought in Athens, as a several who’d heard him at that meeting wanted more information from him, and an even smaller group actually started following Paul.

In our gospel passage today, Jesus stirs the pot in his own way by talking about someone called “The Advocate.” Sounds like a John Grisham or James Patterson title, right? Jesus introduces his disciples to a familiar concept with an unfamiliar application: the concept of the Holy Spirit guiding each of us, not just the prophets. Let’s take a closer look at the passage, beginning in John 14:15.

Our reading printed in the bulletin is from the New Revised Standard Version. Depending on which version you read, you may see a few different English words in your translation, so I want to help clear that up a bit. These differences by themselves don’t mean that any one version is better than another. Translation committees often will have a certain audience in mind or a certain writing style or worldview that governs the words they choose, especially to translate complex concepts from the source language into English.

Verse 15 says: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Sounds pretty straightforward, right? It seems that the last part of the sentence naturally follows from the first part. “If you love your kids, you’ll give them attention.” “If you love your mom, you’ll buy her flowers occasionally.” You get the idea, right? But if you were to read it in New International or King James Version, it sounds more like a command: “If you love me, keep my commands.” I won’t bore you with the technical details of why there is such a difference, but the end result is the same in Jesus’s mind: he wants us to obey his commandments. I do prefer the NRSV translation in our bulletin, because it’s closer to what the original language says, and it sounds less authoritarian.

[For my blog readers, I will give you some of the technical details here. First, verse 15 is a third-class conditional sentence. That means, according to Daniel Wallace in Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (GGBB)[1], that often, “the condition [is] uncertain of fulfillment, but still likely” (emphasis in original). The third-class condition can take any mood-tense combination in the apodosis (the last part of an “if-then” or conditional statement), and therein lies the second technicality. There are three variant spellings of the verb in the phrase in question. The chosen reading is the future tense form of τηρέω (tēreō, “I keep”), τηρήσετε (“you will keep”), being found in its most prominent witness B. The Aleph (א) witness has τηρήσητε aorist subjunctive (“you would keep my commands”). The witnesses A and D have τηρήσατε imperative (“keep my commands”). Notice, for all three variants, there is a difference in spelling of one vowel, which could have easily been confused in a scriptorium where the copy was read aloud for scribes to transcribe. Metzger says the editorial committee for the UBS text felt the future tense reading best fit the context.[2]]

Verse 16 is where you really start seeing the different ways the description of the Holy Spirit is translated. In our text today, Jesus says “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate [capital A], to be with you forever.” The current version of the NIV, which was updated in 2011, has “another advocate [lower case A] to help you and be with you.” So the NIV uses a phrase to translate the word to uncover a bit of the meaning behind what the role of the advocate is. Notice that the NIV doesn’t interpret it as a title like our current text in this verse, but later in the chapter, they do treat it as a title. Some other translations of this word you might see are “Comforter” (KJV); “Counselor” (older version of the NIV); or “Helper” (ESV, NASB).

If you’ve been in the church for a while, you’ve probably heard the Greek term that is behind these English translations: paraclete. The word is not used in the Greek version of the Old Testament, so we can’t make a connection to the “Wonderful Counselor” in Isaiah 9. In ancient Greece, it carried the idea of a helper or assistant in a court of law. John is the only NT writer who uses the word. He uses it of Jesus in 1 John 2:1–2 to speak of Jesus’s role in advocating for us before the Father: “If anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father—Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. ²He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins^[3]”

But the Holy Spirit’s role as the Advocate in our lives is different than that of Jesus’s role before the Father. It opens the door to a new concept: that God’s Holy Spirit would soon be available to all his disciples, and indeed to all believers, once Jesus ascended to Heaven, not just to a select few as in the Old Testament. We see that in the promise of the prophet Joel that Peter cites in his sermon on the Day of Pentecost.

The Holy Spirit’s role really does seem to be best described by the word Advocate. The NIV I think does the best job of explaining the role when the translators added “to help you” as a gloss to “advocate.” The Holy Spirit’s role is twofold: First, he is the living representative of Christ and God in us. Verse 17 says “You know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.” In verse 18, Jesus says, “I will not leave you as orphans.” The Holy Spirit’s presence will be a constant reminder that God loves us, just as he loves his one and only son. And it’s because of that love, as John indicates in vs. 15 above and reemphasizes in vs. 21. John also closes out this short section by saying Jesus will show himself to his disciples through the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

Beyond our passage, we see in 14:26 that our Advocate comes in the name of Jesus “will teach us all things and will remind us of everything [Jesus] said to us.” In saying this, Jesus also says he’ll leave us with peace and assurance that he will come and ultimately rescue us from the evil one himself.

The Holy Spirit’s first role, then, is ultimately to help us mature in our faith. As we spoke about a couple weeks ago when we looked at the “I am the door” passage, Jesus’s sheep know his voice. The Holy Spirit IS the voice of Jesus, the good shepherd, in our lives. The more we love God and Jesus, the more we will come to recognize the Holy Spirit’s voice speaking into our lives.

The second role of the Holy Spirit is to testify about Jesus through us, John 15:26–27. As we begin and continue to grow in our understanding of what life in the Holy Spirit means, we begin to recognize when the Holy Spirit is prompting us to act and to testify about who Jesus is. People will challenge us, and indeed are challenging us today, about our faith in God. According to Jesus in John 16, these challenges to our faith are not new and should not surprise us when they happen. Jesus reminds his disciples in John 16:7–11:

⁷But very truly I tell you, it is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. ⁸When he comes, he will prove the world to be in the wrong about sin and righteousness and judgment: ⁹about sin, because people do not believe in me; ¹⁰about righteousness, because I am going to the Father, where you can see me no longer; ¹¹and about judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.^[4]

John goes on to say that when persecution starts to come our way, the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, will guide us into all truth. We won’t have to worry about what we’ll say, because the Holy Spirit will be directing us straight from the heavenly throne.

How does this look in real life? I want to close by giving an example from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Five times in that letter, Paul emphasizes that believers on earth have a connection to “the heavenly realms.” In 1:3, Paul says we, that is, the corporate body of Christ, together, have been “blessed in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” This comes from the power of the Holy Spirit dwelling in us. I want to emphasize that this a corporate gift, that is, no one person has every spiritual blessing, but as a body of believers, in the aggregate, we have on earth everything God wants us to have to carry out the ministries he’s called us to.

We learn toward the end of chapter 1 that the heavenly realms are where Christ is seated at the right hand of God, and all things have been placed under the rule and authority of Christ for benefit of the body of Christ. A few verses later, in 2:6, we find out that when Christ calls us and saves us, we too already have the blessing of being raised up and seated with Christ “in the heavenly realms.” It is from that vantage point, our souls connected to heaven, and our feet touching the ground, that we can “do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

In chapter 3 vs. 10, Paul reveals that God’s intent was that as the corporate body of Christ, the church, “the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.” Without getting too involved in the concept of spiritual warfare, this speaks to our role of testifying about Jesus to the world as we saw in John 14–16 above. That is our purpose: to speak forth the word of God in both action and deed. In the first three chapters of Ephesians, Paul affirms who we are in Christ and what our exalted position is before him. In the last three chapters of Ephesians, he gives several examples of what it means to live in the heavenly realms, culminating with chapter 6 about putting on the armor of God, where we find his final reference to the heavenly realms:

¹⁰Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. ¹¹Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. ¹²For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. ¹³Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. ¹⁴Stand firm then…”^[5]

Paul goes on to describe the armor of God, for that is what it truly is. If you were to look up the references to each of the pieces of armor mentioned in the Old Testament, you would find that every one is mentioned in the context of God wearing it or wielding it. That armor isn’t a cheap imitation or a mass-produced copy. It’s the protection and strength of God himself. That’s what Jesus was affirming for us by speaking of our Advocate, the Holy Spirit, coming to dwell within us to teach us, empower us, and embolden us to speak his word.

It seems like the days of evil are fast encroaching on us. Don’t get left behind. Believe in Jesus if you don’t already. Commit yourself to loving him and receive the strength and power of the Advocate for our souls, the Holy Spirit. Maranatha! Come Lord Jesus! Amen!

[1] Wallace, Daniel B. 1996. Greek Grammar beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan (Logos version).

[2] Metzger, Bruce M. 1971/1975 (corrected). A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament. Stuttgart: United Bible Societies.

^[3] 1 John 2:1–2. The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

^[4] John 16:7–11. The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

^[5] Ephesians 6:10–14a. The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

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May 12, 2023

Strength from Forgiveness (Psalm 51; 1 Timothy 1:12–17)

Filed under: 1 Timothy,2 Samuel,Biblical Studies,Faith, Faithfulness,Greek,Hebrew,Repentance,Soteriology — Scott Stocking @ 6:27 pm
Tags: (חָנַן ḥā·nǎn) mercy, 1 Timothy 1:12–17, David and Bathsheba, forgiveness, God’s “unfailing love”, mercy, restoration, חֶסֶד (ḥě·sěḏ)

Click above to listen to message.

Sermon preached at Mt. View Presbyterian Church, September 11, 2022. Edited for publication.

There is no price we can pay or effort we can make to compel God to give us mercy or grace.

I think most of us are familiar with the story of David and Bathsheba. One evening (we don’t know how late, but the text says David had gotten out bed), David was out on the roof of his palace looking over the city when he saw at a nearby neighbor’s house the beautiful Bathsheba bathing (2 Sam 11:2–5). In that moment, David forgot he was otherwise known as a man after God’s own heart. The key word there is “forgot.” David should have known better. Bathsheba was not some exhibitionist bathing for all of Jerusalem to see. She had in that culture that valued purity and faithfulness a reasonable expectation of privacy. Most likely there were civic codes that prevented you from building your home in such a way as to risk violating your neighbor’s privacy. For example, in some Mediterranean cultures, they had rules that you couldn’t have a window in your house that allowed you to see directly into your neighbor’s house or back yard, especially if such a window was on the second floor. The palace may have been large enough to be exempted from such rules, but the principle existed nonetheless.

Add to this that shame of nakedness in that day would not have been on the one who was naked outside, especially if she had a right to privacy, but the shame would have been on the one who looked upon the nakedness. That is why Noah’s sons had to back into the tent to cover their naked, drunk father after the flood. David should have known immediately to avert his gaze and go somewhere else where such a view was not possible. It may be that David was on the roof of his palace, perhaps trying to get a view of the distant battle or the campfires of the troops or just to take in the cooler air. It would not have been a normal place for him to hang out. David had several opportunities to do the right thing in this situation, but the more he looked, the more he wanted Bathsheba. He could have done nothing at that point except walk away, but he didn’t. Instead, he sent someone to bring Bathsheba to him. He lay with her and got her pregnant.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, he tried to manipulate the situation by first giving Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, a break from the battle in the hopes he would lay with Bathsheba and some might not question the paternity of the baby. But Uriah showed more integrity than David, so David sent him back to the battle with instructions to his commander, Joab, to manipulate the battle in such a way that Uriah would surely perish, and he did.

Of course, we know that David’s sin was exposed by the prophet Nathan, and we see David’s repentant, godly response in Psalm 51.

Read Psalm 51:1–10

¹Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love;

according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.

²Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.

³For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me.

⁴Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight;

so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge.

⁵Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.

⁶Yet you desired faithfulness even in the womb; you taught me wisdom in that secret place.

⁷Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.

⁸Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice.

⁹Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity.

¹⁰Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

¹¹Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me.

¹²Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me. ^[1]

So David is busted. Found out. Exposed. It was pointless for him to deny it. And he didn’t live in a culture where such behavior, especially in the political class, would be ignored and swept under the rug. He had to face his maker. And he chose the best path, the only path, really, to put him on the road to restoration. God was giving his anointed a chance to come clean through the prophet Nathan’s intervention, and David accepted. He pleaded with God for mercy and owned up to his mistake.

This word for “mercy” here, (חָנַן ḥā·nǎn), is almost always used in the context of someone speaking, more so than in a running narrative that tells a story. The New International Version tends to translate it based on the perspective of the speaker. In the current passage, and for about one-third of the total occurrences of the word in the OT, if the speaker knows they’ve done wrong and they ask for ḥānǎn, the translators use the word “mercy.” On the other hand, if the speaker has acted justly and feels threatened by the enemy, or is referencing the goodness of God generally, the translators usually use “gracious” or “generous” for the word. That sense of the word represents about half the total occurrences of the word. These two primary meanings represent a modern distinction that some have made between “mercy” and “grace.” “Mercy” is not getting what you deserve, while “grace” is getting what you don’t deserve or didn’t earn. In both cases, it is a gift of God. And in both cases, there is no price we can pay or effort we can make to compel God to give us mercy or grace. We can ask for it, we can search for it, but the “price” for such a gift can only be paid by God, which he ultimately did through Jesus on the cross.

This is where the other key word in Psalm 51:1 comes in, a Hebrew word you’ve most likely heard before if you been in church or Bible studies for any length of time: חֶסֶד (ḥě·sěḏ), God’s “unfailing love.” Of the 245 times this word is used in the OT, well over three-fourths of the occurrences refer to God’s enduring, unfailing love and kindness. And nearly half of the uses of the word are found in the Psalms, including in the praise Psalm 136, where “His love (ḥěsěḏ) endures forever” is a repeated refrain at the end of each of its 26 verses.

As one Bible dictionary puts it, ḥěsěḏ is not a “disposition,” that is, it’s not just a feeling or a certain way of thinking. It is in the end a helpful act of God rooted in his covenant relationship to us, or when applied to us mortals, our helpful acts of love toward family and friends. It is an overflow of his righteousness, mercy, and shalom peace. As a covenant responsibility, David expects to and has a certain level of assurance that he will be forgiven. This is the same assurance we have when we come to Jesus: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). As I said above, there’s nothing we can do to earn this, but we can and should respond to it with a ḥěsěḏ of our own. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Not only is this ḥěsěḏ toward God, but toward our family and friends as well.

In vv. 5–6, David gives us a contrast between the way we are and the way God wants us to be. I want to use the English Standard Version translation of these two verses here because I think they’re a little less interpretive of the Hebrew text, and come much closer to what David was trying to convey:

⁵ Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

⁶ Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being, and you teach me wisdom in the secret heart.^[2]

On the one hand, David realizes he is a sinner in need of God’s grace. But on the other hand, David knows that only God can transform his inner being into the godly character he desires. God knew David was a sinner in need of his grace, and that David might fall short of the ḥěsěḏ standard miserably at times, but he still chooses him anyway to lead his people. Verse 5 is similar to Paul’s essay in Romans 7 about doing what he doesn’t want to do and recognizing that sin still may try to get a stranglehold on him. But by sending the prophet to David, God is giving David a chance to come clean, to repent, and he does. God doesn’t ostracize or “cancel” his anointed because of one or two or five or ten mistakes. God’s ḥěsěḏ requires our willingness to be taught and to seek his truth to transform our inner being. God is forever the God of the next chance. God’s gift and his calling on our lives are without repentance, “irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). So no matter how many times you think you’ve failed or fallen short, know that he has called you for a purpose, and that he is guiding you and strengthening you in his ḥěsěḏ love to bring about his will.

Verses 10–12 give us a glimpse of how we get God’s truth in our inward being and his wisdom in our “secret” heart. After forgiving us and cleansing us, David recognizes that he must immerse himself in the presence of God to experience the restoration and renewal that awaits him. This is not a passive process: David goes on in the psalm to commit himself to teaching others about God’s ways and singing the praises of God aloud.

Verse 12, then, ties into our Gospel reading this morning from Luke 15: Both the shepherd and the woman have lost something of value. In the case of the shepherd, he leaves behind everything of value he does have, that is, the flock, to find the one sheep that is missing. This is what God does for us to bring us back to him.

In the case of the woman, she must clean her whole household to find the missing coin. David asked God to “cleanse” him with hyssop and remove from him all that would keep him from experiencing God to the fullest. Notice that he didn’t pledge to clean up his own life. God doesn’t need to wait for us to do that on our own. He meets us where we are and works with us from that point forward to bring restoration.

For both the shepherd and woman, there is rejoicing for finding what was lost and restoring it to its rightful place. Jesus draws the parallels there with both stories to the heavens rejoicing when one sinner repents. When we know God is with us, we can feel assured of our salvation, our calling, and the power of his ḥěsěḏ love.

Before I wrap up this morning, I want to bring in a passage that shows how this transformation from sin to victory worked itself out in Paul’s life. Let’s look at 1 Timothy 1:12–17:

¹²I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength, that he considered me trustworthy, appointing me to his service. ¹³Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man, I was shown mercy because I acted in ignorance and unbelief. ¹⁴The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

¹⁵Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. ¹⁶But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his immense patience as an example for those who would believe in him and receive eternal life. ¹⁷Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.^[3]

We only need to look at verse 13 to see how far Paul was from the Christian faith. First of all, he calls himself a blasphemer, which by itself would have been enough to get him stoned to death in Israel. But in context here, he’s probably referring to his initial denial of Christ as Lord and his approval of the stoning of Stephen, because the Jews thought Stephen had blasphemed in his final, fatal message. Paul was a persecutor. He thought this new Jesus movement was so dangerous to traditional Judaism that the followers had to be jailed or snuffed out, violently if necessary. He even admits to acting ignorantly and in unbelief, and that he was the worst of all sinners.

Yet with all that, God still chose to use Paul to be the main messenger of the faith in the northern Mediterranean region. He humbly gives thanks and praise for all that God has done for him and is doing through him. His life would be the ultimate testimony of the transforming power of God’s grace and salvation.

I want to focus for a moment here on verse 12, because I believe that parallels what David’s desire was in his psalm of repentance: “I thank Christ Jesus our Lord, who has given me strength.” I guess you could say Paul was “fortunate” enough to have a direct revelation from Jesus to set his life in the right direction. Granted, that was probably a pretty scary situation for him, as it would be for any of us, I imagine. But the attempt to turn a violent and desperate man from his ways required corresponding radical action of God to set him straight. That seems to have been enough, at least initially, to have “strengthened” Paul, because we see very soon after his conversion in Acts 9:22 that Luke tells us, “Saul (Paul) grew more and more powerful (or strengthened) and baffled the Jews living in Damascus by proving that Jesus is the Messiah.” He relates his own story here so that in 2 Timothy 2:1, he can also encourage Timothy to be strong in God’s grace as well. Having the examples of men and women of faith, both in the Bible and in our own lives, will help us stay grounded in the faith and give us strength and endurance for our Christian walk. The author of Hebrews said it well:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, ²fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. ³Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.^[4]

My friends, do not lose heart. Every day, lift up the Lord Jesus in your life through word and deed, and give God the praise and glory he deserves.

Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen.^[5]

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

^[2] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. 2016. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles.

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

^[4] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

^[5] The New International Version. 2011. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

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Sunday Morning Greek Blog

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

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August 4, 2023

The Everyday Kingdom of God: Minor Parables of Matthew 13

July 22, 2023

Counting the Days: Acts 10 and Jewish Time References

The Background

Counting the Days: Jewish Reckoning of Time Forward

Counting the Days: Jewish Reckoning of Past Time

Wells’s Absurd Absurdity

Conclusion

July 10, 2023

A Childlike Faith in a Patient God (Matthew 11:16–30)

June 28, 2023

A Plentiful Harvest (Matthew 9:35–10:23)

May 17, 2023

Life in the Spirit (John 14:15–21)

May 12, 2023

Strength from Forgiveness (Psalm 51; 1 Timothy 1:12–17)

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