April - Reading 7

Hi Folks,

In the Mark reading, Jesus is trying to tell the disciples of John the Baptist that not only has a prophecy been fulfilled, but that there is something new to consider. Jesus' disciples are not fasting because He is with them. Here He identifies Himself as the bridegroom as well. And then He explains something of the newness of what is happening -- the new wine requires a new wineskin. I don't know if this was explained before, but new wine was only partially fermented, and it was put in bladders or stomachs of slaughtered animals -- these were the wineskins. They were used because they would stretch with the further fermenting of the wine. Once the wine was fully fermented, the animal tissue was also fully stretched. If one attempted to put a new batch of wine in the wineskin that had already been stretched, it would burst. So it was with the New Covenant Jesus was establishing. The old covenant of the Law simply would not hold it. It COULD not hold it. The Law could not hold God Himself, for it was God who had instituted the Law.

Jesus further identifies Himself with the incident regarding picking and eating the grain on the Sabbath. In telling the Pharisees that the Son of Man was Lord of the Sabbath, He was identifying Himself as God in the flesh. This, needless to say, did not go over well with the Pharisees, who had themselves, with their overlordship of the Jewish religion, put themselves in the place of God as "His representatives", making up new laws and establishing new traditions the people had to follow. If this sounds a bit like a current teaching and group centered on Vatican Hill, maybe some ought to notice that...

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1 Cor. 6:1-11 is a bit hard for many Christians to swallow. We are NOT to take one another before a court of law. Period.

Rather than try to explain this theoretically, I would rather give a bit of testimony here. There was a time, many years ago, that we invested quite a bit of money with a friend who was developing some land. The friend, a professing Christian, took the money and lived off of it for awhile. Gradually we got the hang of what was going on and were stunned, to say the least. What to do? Wanting to obey God, the decision was made to confront this man in front of his own pastor. The pastor agreed and so the meeting was set. It was strange. We talked to our friend and literally had to show him what he had done. He had, it seemed, actually deceived himself as to what had taken place! As the meeting continued, a look of shock crossed his face and he became very embarrassed as the immensity of what he had done dawned on him. As it turned out, we were not the only people he had deceived. The upshot of it was that he really did, through the following years, end up paying us back the entire principle. We had not asked for interest. He also paid back the other folk and today is a truly fine Christian man.

There is a reason for the directions God gives us in the Bible. And there is a reason Christ has said so plainly, "If you love me you will obey me." Sometimes it seems hard to trust God with what seems to go against "common sense." But we do well to remember who is God and who is not in situations like that.

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Psalm 78: 1-39

This is a psalm of Asaph, the leader of one of David's Levitical choirs. The first 39 verses (and it continues after that) recite some of early Israel's history in its relationship with God. This was a common way of beginning a lesson which the author or teller wanted to emphasize. We see both Moses and Joshua doing the same thing, as well as Stephen, when he was before the Pharisees. There is a recurring theme in this Psalm:
v. 8 "...whose hearts were not loyal to God."
v. 10 "they did not keep God's covenant and refused to live by his law."
v. 11 "They forgot what he had done..."
v. 17 "But they continued to sin against him, rebelling in the desert against the Most High."
v. 22 "...for they did not believe in God or trust in his deliverance."
v. 32 "In spite of all this, they kept on sinning; in spite of his ownders, they did not believe."
v. 37 "...their hearts were not loyal to him..."

And yet, as this section closes with:

"Yet he was merciful;
he forgave their iniquities
and did not destroy them.
Time after time he restrained his anger
and did not stir up his full wrath.
He remembered that they were but flesh,
a passing breeze that does not return."

(For those who need verses showing the Bible denies reincarnation, by the way, the above is a good one.)

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Joshua 15-17 involves the specific division of the land among various Israeli tribes. Aside from the historical interest here, we can also take this personally. God has a provision for all circumstances. It behooves us to look to Him for directions in everything we do -- or attempt to do!

 

Thanks Clint for the boundaries map in particular, a useful visual aid when reading the current passages.
Gwyneth