July 10 – Thoughts on Job 41-42 & Acts 16:22-40

We can get pretty proud of our own righteousness.  We look around and see people who are acting more sinfully than we are and we puff up a bit.  “After all I don’t smoke/swear/get drunk/sleep around/act with physical violence/watch pornography.  I am a much better parent/employee/student/Christian/person than they are.”  Oh, we would never say this out loud – that wouldn’t seem humble – but we think it way too often.

The next assumption we make is that if we are more righteous than others, then we get rewarded.  “What did I do to deserve this?!” people cry out.  “Wow, you must have been good to get that reward” is the same thought with a different direction  But this idea that good behavior brings rewards and bad behavior punishment isn’t Christianity but karma.  If it were true, we would have no explanation for Job, Jesus, or Paul’s lives.

When people come to me and ask what sin they have committed that God seems to be working against them, I assure them that God doesn’t act this way.  God doesn’t punish or reward us based on our righteousness.  In fact, Jesus tell us plainly that this righteousness of which we’re so proud is no more than a soiled undergarment in relation to God’s expectation of us (“Be perfect, then, as your Father in Heaven is perfect.”)

Paul and Silas would have been freed from their prison regardless because that is what God planned to happen.  It wasn’t their obedience or their righteousness that freed them but God’s will.  So why should we obey?  What’s the benefit of a righteous life?  For Paul and Silas, because they were faithful and worshiped God all night in jail, their jailer and his whole household were saved.  Our righteousness doesn’t give us good outcomes – God does what God does – but it will win others to Christ.

So before we get too proud of our own righteousness, let’s remember that it too is a tool for mission, not a badge of honor.

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July 9 – Thoughts on Job 38-40 & Acts 16:1-21

God speaks to us.  It’s a reality that few have experienced as directly as Job and Paul in our readings today, but a reality that we profess regardless.  For Job, God speaks in a tone I sure wouldn’t want Him using with me.  After 35 chapters of Job defending his own honor and railing against God’s unfairness to him, God speaks.  And His tone is one of impatience and even anger.  We like to translated it into the voice of a loving Father, but read at face value, God is tired of Job’s railing and arrogance.  And His argument (“I am eternal, all powerful, and omniscient.  You are Job.  Do you have the right to question me?”) is pretty compelling and indisputable.

For Paul, God speaks in three ways.  It is interesting to note that the language of the communication, though only 3 verses apart, speaks of three different means of communication.  First, the “Holy Spirit” keeps them from preaching in Asia.  Then the “Spirit of Jesus” keeps them from entering Bithynia.  And finally, Paul has a vision in the night of a man.  Why the differing language for each communication?  What is the difference between “the Holy Spirit” and “the Spirit of Jesus”?  And why would God speak in 3 different ways?  Questions for heaven someday.

I have people weekly speak to me of hearing God’s voice.  “God has told me to” is the rarest since it implies a direct vocal communication from God.  “God has called me to” is more common, and is unfortunately used of most decisions.  Yes, God does call us to action and actions, but when someone tells me God called them to work at their job, only a week later to tell me that God is calling them on to another job (almost always with a higher salary or better benefits) I wonder.  “God has told me to tell you” some complaint or another is also not uncommon.  I fear that we use God the way we use “lots of people” to give weight to our own opinions, as in “lots of people think the same way that I do about ________”.

But when people tell me that they think God is telling them to do something unpleasant, painful, or dangerous, I tend to listen more.  Biblically, God’s call is to salvation most of the time, but on occasion it is to an activity, and that activity is usually unpleasant.  Because God doesn’t have to call us to the things we want to do, does He?

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July 8 – Thoughts on Job 36-37 & Acts 15:22-41

There were a number of churches in a previous hometown of mine that were all very similar.  I asked a knowledgeable friend about it to see if a single church had planted the rest or what.  It turns out that this was the case, in a way.  One group in the original church had gotten disgruntled and left, planting another church very similar to the first.  Another group saw the success of this church and in the next disagreement left and planted another.  From this plant, a disagreement arose and so they split and planted yet another.  Eventually, there were a number of churches that were all very similar, all doing good ministry, and all existing because of conflict.  While not an ideal way of planting churches, God seems to have blessed this situation, and one of these churches was adopted in to the Covenant recently.

Conflict within the church is both a painful time and a time for true growth.  Little growth happens when all is going smoothly.  Nonetheless, we all strive for a conflict-free life, and the early church wasn’t much different.  This is why rabble-rousers like the Apostle Paul who stirred up uncomfortable trouble were so, well, troubling.

Another example is here in today’s reading.  What happens when the missionary pair of Paul and Barnabas disagree about something as important as who travels with them?  Barnabas trusts John Mark even though he abandoned them during their last trip for unknown reasons.  Paul, on the other hand, disagrees and doesn’t want to take the risk of being abandoned again.  So what do you do?

These two simply split up, each taking a different “second” and so created two missionary teams where once there was one.  We don’t hear much about Barnabas and John Mark after this, but not because they are ineffective.

We avoid conflict primarily out of fear of this kind of division within the church.  But we also trust God to redeem every situation.  Maybe we can trust God in the midst of our own conflict as well.

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July 7 – Thoughts on Job 34-35 & Acts 15:1-21

The Jerusalem Council is one of the turning points of the New Testament.  We have Peter who, through the vision of the sail full of unclean animals, has entered the home of a Gentile, shared the gospel with him, and baptized his whole family.  And we also have Paul, who has been preaching the gospel to the Gentiles all through Galatia with plans to expand all the way to Rome itself.

But this leaves the Church with a very difficult question: what does “conversion” look like for Gentiles? For Jews, who follow the Old Testament law, it means following Jesus’ interpretation of that law, his “yoke” which He claims is easy and light. But for Gentiles who do not follow the Old Testament law, how does that work?

The Pharisees among the believers believed that conversion for Gentiles was a two-step process.  First, they had to become “Jewish” by following the Law of Moses, and then they could become Christians.  But this didn’t work for Paul’s company who believed they could simply follow Jesus.  So, what to do?

James gives them the answer after consulting with the other church leaders.  The limit of the OT law they had to follow was (1) no meat offered to idols, (2) no sexual immorality, (3) no meat of strangled animals, and (4) no blood.  This was to “make it easy for the Gentiles”.

Does this mean that beyond these four things, the OT law doesn’t apply to Gentiles?  Does this mean that we should require the same of our churches?  What exactly is covered in “sexual immorality” since the other three are pretty clear cut?

These questions have been argued and battled over for centuries, so we’re not going to answer them here.  But it does show that from the very beginning, what parts of the OT law are relevant and which are not has been a hot topic for the Church.

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July 6 – Thoughts on Job 32-33 & Acts 14

(Note:  This is a continuation from yesterday’s writing.  If you haven’t read it, please do to clarify this blog)

From yesterday, our list of Good and Bad were…
Good:  weep for those in trouble, grieve over poverty, hospitality, caring for the homeless.
Bad: lust, lying, adultery, denying justice to workers, not helping the poor/widow/orphan,  not clothing the needy, put my trust in gold instead of God, idol worship, rejoicing over my enemies misfortune, hiding sin out of fear of others’ opinions.

In this, the earliest vice list in the bible, what do you notice about what God calls Good and Bad?  Notice how many of them are communal: caring about, grieving over, being kind to others.  Even the things we consider individual vices today (lying, adultery, lust) are really communal.  In fact, the only ones that don’t involve another person involve God: idolatry and faithlessness.

Today we’ve taken this to an unhealthy extreme.  “As long as I’m not hurting anyone, anything is fine.”  “What we do in the privacy of our home is none of your (or God’s) business.”  But this list is so much more than our individualistic take on morality.  It once again shows that the Christian life, and therefore Christian morality, is communal.

Today, while we rail against people for their stance on abortion or human sexuality, we tend to ignore the things in lists like this, things like caring for the poor and homeless, and clothing the needy.  And we seldom think about our emotions as being sinful, things like weeping for those in trouble, grieving over the poverty in our world.  But without the emotion behind it, without compassion for others, our care for them will be short lived.

What if we prioritized community not just in the church but in the city in which we’ve been placed?  What if the greatest sin we could think of was that someone might have to live in their car while we could help them?  Or wear tattered clothes when we have closets-full that we don’t even wear?  It’s easy to demonize adultery or courtroom injustice, but what about our own sinful misuse of wealth, or lack of compassion for the poor, the neglected, the homeless, the foreigners and aliens in this world?

What if we reordered our own vice list to better align with the Bible’s?

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