R.P. Nettelhorst's Blog, page 91

Redemption

To the angel of the church in Ephesus write:

These are the words of him who holds the seven stars in his right hand and walks among the seven golden lampstands: I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate wicked men, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not, and have found them false. You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name, and have not grown weary.

Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love. Remember the height from which you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first. If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place. But you have this in your favor: You hate the practices of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. (Revelation 2:1-7)

[insight]

It’s easy to get distracted. You need to refill your coffee cup, so you go to the kitchen. There, you see the milk needs to be put back in the refrigerator. Before you know it, you’re back in your office and your coffee is cold. Ephesus was a prosperous port city along the Aegean Sea on Turkey’s west coast. The first of the seven letters that Jesus dictated to John was addressed to the church there. The seven lampstands represented the seven churches of Asia Minor, and the stars in Jesus’ hands represented the members of those churches.

Jesus told the Ephesians that they had lost their first love. Jesus once told his disciples that people would know they were his disciples because they loved one another. When hatred for sin changes into hatred for those who sin, Christians have lost their first love: the redeeming love of Jesus who came to save sinners, to call sinners, to reach out to sinners. Jesus warned the church in Ephesus that should they not change, he would remove their lampstand: that is, they would cease to be a church. Where love has been replaced by hatred, the unity of the body will crumble and the members will scatter. Churches die when hate replaces love. We need to remember to offer sinners redemption rather than condemnation.

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The Dark Place

Paul, knowing some of the council was made up of Sadducees and others of Pharisees and how they hated each other, decided to exploit their antagonism: “Friends, I am a stalwart Pharisee from a long line of Pharisees. It’s because of my Pharisee convictions—the hope and resurrection of the dead—that I’ve been hauled into this court.”

The moment he said this, the council split right down the middle, Pharisees and Sadducees going at each other in heated argument. Sadducees have nothing to do with a resurrection or angels or even a spirit. If they can’t see it, they don’t believe it. Pharisees believe it all. And so a huge and noisy quarrel broke out. Then some of the religion scholars on the Pharisee side shouted down the others: “We don’t find anything wrong with this man! And what if a spirit has spoken to him? Or maybe an angel? What if it turns out we’re fighting against God?”

That was fuel on the fire. The quarrel flamed up and became so violent the captain was afraid they would tear Paul apart, limb from limb. He ordered the soldiers to get him out of there and escort him back to the safety of the barracks.

That night the Master appeared to Paul: “It’s going to be all right. Everything is going to turn out for the best. You’ve been a good witness for me here in Jerusalem. Now you’re going to be my witness in Rome!” (Acts 23:6-11)

I must admit to spending a lot of time in the dark place. But I realize that pessimism really has no place in the lives of Christians. Once Paul had returned to Jerusalem, he went to the temple. While there, he nearly caused a riot and got himself arrested. Once the Roman authorities realized he was a Roman citizen, they released him and had Paul appear before the Sanhedrin. Soon he was under arrest again.

Ever since Paul had gone to Jerusalem things had gone badly for him and they were only getting worse. But in the darkness of the evening, alone in jail, Jesus offered Paul encouragement. He told Paul that he was going to Rome to continue being a missionary. There was nothing more that Paul wanted than to tell others about Jesus.

Paul was still in jail and would stay there a long time. But knowing what God’s will for us is and then doing it is the best way to stay encouraged. Like Paul, part of God’s will for us is to testify about Jesus, wherever we happen to be. Along our way, like Paul, God will always take care of us.

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The Importance of Backups

One of the more important things I learned in the dark ages of computing was the importance of backing up my work. About twenty-five years ago when I taught at Los Angeles Baptist College—which subsequently became The Master’s College—my office was located on the second floor of an old two story stone building in the middle of the campus. It was one of the most ancient structures there. According to legend, in the distant mists of antiquity, it had been used as the cafeteria. Given how small it was, I found that difficult to imagine.

In any case, my office was located up a narrow flight of stairs, one of but two rooms on that second floor—the two rooms being separated by a closet that housed a tiny sink and toilet. It had a window air conditioner and was lined with bookcases. Its two windows overlooked a courtyard that was filled with stone benches and scattered oak trees.

At the time—this being the dark ages—I was one of only two faculty members on campus who had a computer in his office. It wasn’t much, even back then: I had a Commodore 128—an upgrade from my previous machine, a Commodore 64. The Commodore 128 could run CP/M, an operating system that predated both MS-DOS and Windows. As a result, I could use WordStar (an ancient word processing program) and I saved my files to a 3 ½ inch floppy disk. There was no hard drive. Hard drives were rare and expensive back in these primitive times.

In any case, I was happily working in my office writing up my notes for a lecture; it was September and a warm day in southern California and the office became a bit stuffy. I decided to turn on the air conditioner.

It came to life, I returned to my seat, sat down, and was just starting to type when suddenly the power in my office died. Running the air conditioner at the same time I was using a computer was more than the circuits in that old building could handle. With the loss of power, I lost nearly two hours’ worth of typing: I hadn’t bothered to hit “save.”

Losing but a relatively small amount of work, however, affected me profoundly. First, and most obviously: I never again tried using the A/C when I was on my computer in that office. But secondly, and most importantly, I vowed never to lose my work like that again. I became a fanatic about saving my work. And not only did I save it to one floppy, I would make multiple copies on multiple floppies. And I would keep one floppy at work in my office, and another one at home.

As technology and my finances improved I moved from Commodore to MS-DOS and ultimately to Windows-based machines—machines that came with a hard drive. But I rely exclusively on my hard drive. I still regularly back up my work to floppy disks. When it became possible to burn data to CDs, I started using those at backups—on a monthly basis. And my paranoia and fear knew no bounds. Not only would I keep copies of the backup CDs in both my home office and the one at the small seminary where I teach now, I would stick copies in an envelope and mail them off to a friend in Colorado: what if my house burned down? What if California was devastated by an earthquake?

When my wife and children got computers and I connected them together on my home network, I started backing up my files to their machines on a regular basis. Adding an external hard drive as a backup was not long in coming after that—though I soon learned that such drives are fickle beasts and can die just like any other bit of hardware.

Today, I feel almost comfortable about my backup situation: not only do I have two external hard drives and the hard drives of my family members, I also have what are called “cloud” drives. These are spaces on the computer servers of large corporations dedicated to backing-up one’s data. There are several of these available that are completely free. I use four of them. And thanks to a little free program Microsoft has called SyncToy, I can automatically back up all my files to all four cloud drives and my external hard drives every night while I sleep. The cloud drives I use are DropBox, GoogleDrive, Amazon’s CloudDrive, and Microsoft’s Skydrive.

Besides the obvious advantage of now having multiple backups keeping my data safe and my fearful mind at ease, I have the incredible convenience, thanks to how cloud drives work, of being able to access my documents on any computer, tablet or smartphone anywhere I happen to be, despite only having saved them to my home computer.

This past Sunday I once again had to preach at my church—our pastor was out of town. I saved my sermon and the accompanying PowerPoint presentation on my computer on Saturday afternoon. When I got to church the next morning, all I took with me was my iPad. Thanks to the cloud drives—I specifically made use of Skydrive at church—I was able to bring up my sermon text on my iPad, and my wife could bring up the PowerPoint presentation on her laptop—despite the fact that I had never saved or transferred those documents to either device. Had I wanted to, I could have accessed my sermon on my cellphone. Or I could have looked at them on one of the computers in our church library and then printed off hard copies on the printer. Thanks to cloud drives, my stuff is not only stored securely—I can access it from anywhere! I never again have to worry about losing my data and I never have to worry about forgetting some important paper or presentation; I now always have everything with me no matter where I am.

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How’s It Going?

We are about a third of the way through the second decade of the twenty-first century. How have the first thirteen years of this new century stacked up when compared to the events of the same period during the advent of the twentieth century? Has our world been transformed as radically in thirteen years as it was during the first few years of the twentieth, which saw the advent of heavier than air flight, Einstein’s theory of Relativity, and the advent of radio?

In 1900 the botanist Hugo de Vries rediscovered Mendel’s Laws of Heredity and the Diesel engine was first demonstrated by Rudolph Diesel at the World’s Fair in Paris.

The phonograph became common in American homes after 1900. By 1907 a record of Enrico Caruso singing “Vesti la gubba” became the first recording to sell a million copies.

The Brownie camera appeared in 1900, ushering in the era of the “snapshot.” In 1901 the first electric typewriter was invented. The same year, Marconi made the first successful radio transmission. Commercial broadcasting began not many years later. The same year Willis Carrier demonstrated the first indoor air conditioner.

1903 saw the first windshield wiper and the first controlled, powered, sustained heavier than air flight by the Wright brothers.

In 1907 commercial color photography arrived. The following year the first affordable automobile came on the market: the Ford Model T. In 1908 Hans Geiger invented what we now call the Geiger counter for measuring radioactivity.

In 1911 Roald Amundsen’s expedition reached the South Pole. The first airmail service began. The following year, 1912, William Lawrence Bragg presented his derivation of Bragg’s law for the angles for coherent and incoherent scattering from a crystal lattice, creating the field of x-ray crystallography. This is what later made it possible for scientists to image the double helix of DNA late in the twentieth century.

Finally, in 1913, the Ford Motor Company introduced the first moving assembly line, reducing the time it took to assemble a chassis from twelve and a half hours to about two and a half hours: the era of mass production had begun.

So how do the first thirteen years of the twenty-first century compare to all that? The year 2000 was the final date during which there were no humans in space. Since then, the International Space Station has been continuously occupied by at least three people and usually six.

In 2001 Wikipedia launched on the Internet. It currently contains more than four million articles spanning the equivalent of about thirty-two million pages. If it were printed out, it would fill 1951 volumes, each containing about 1.6 million words. Also in 2001: the world’s first self-contained artificial heart was implanted into Robert Tools; Dennis Tito became the first space tourist; and the music industry was transformed by the release of the first iPod and opening of Apple’s iTunes.

In 2003 the Human Genome Project—the sequencing of a complete map of the human genome—was completed. Next year, in 2004, the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity arrived on Mars. Although Spirit and Opportunity were designed to survive only 90 days, Spirit continued functioning until 2009, while Opportunity is still going strong. 2004 was also the year that SpaceShipOne made the first privately funded human spaceflight.

In 2005 Deep Impact became the first spaceship to smash into a comet, while New Horizons was launched toward Pluto for a 2015 rendezvous.

In 2007 the first Amazon Kindle arrived on the market. The publishing industry will never be the same. Today, twenty percent of all books sold are ebooks. Also in 2007: the first iPhone was released. The Android-based smartphone arrived the next year. Today, there are more than 6 billion cellphone subscribers. That means that about 87 percent of the human race owns a cellphone.

In 2008, the Large Hadron Collider became operational. It is the largest “atom smasher” ever built. It is seventeen miles in circumference, sitting about 574 feet beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

In 2009 the Kepler Spacecraft went into space. Between then and 2013 it discovered more than three thousand planets around distant stars, demonstrating that nearly every point of light in the nighttime sky is surrounded by planets.

The first iPad arrived on the market in 2001. Tablet computers are now the fastest selling segment of the computer industry.

In 2011, MESSENGER entered orbit around Mercury, becoming the first spacecraft to ever do so. Meanwhile, the ion-powered spacecraft Dawn became the first spacecraft to orbit the asteroid Vesta. After spending a year there, it left for the minor planet Ceres for a meeting in 2015.

In 2012, the Curiosity rover –an automobile-sized, nuclear-powered, laser wielding machine—landed on Mars. SpaceX successfully delivered cargo to the ISS, marking the beginning of the private exploitation of space. Meanwhile, two asteroid mining companies were established: Planetary Resources and Deep Space Industries. And the Higgs boson was at last detected at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

This year has witnessed the first kidney grown in vitro and the first human liver grown from stem cells.

And then: researchers at Harvard have just discovered that injecting a protein called SIRT1 into 22 month old mice rejuvenated them. New Scientist Magazine reported that within a week, “markers of muscular atrophy and inflammation had dropped and the mice had even developed a different muscle type more common in younger mice. Together, these features were characteristic of 6-month-old mice.” This included the muscles in the heart. What does that mean? They successfully reversed aging in mice. It was like a sixty year old man suddenly becoming twenty.

Human trials are slated to begin in 2014.

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Love Above All Else

He entered again into a synagogue; and a man was there whose hand was withered. They were watching Him to see if He would heal him on the Sabbath, so that they might accuse Him. He said to the man with the withered hand, “Get up and come forward!”

And He said to them, “Is it lawful to do good or to do harm on the Sabbath, to save a life or to kill?” But they kept silent.

After looking around at them with anger, grieved at their hardness of heart, He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored. The Pharisees went out and immediately began conspiring with the Herodians against Him, as to how they might destroy Him.

Jesus withdrew to the sea with His disciples; and a great multitude from Galilee followed; and also from Judea, and from Jerusalem, and from Idumea, and beyond the Jordan, and the vicinity of Tyre and Sidon, a great number of people heard of all that He was doing and came to Him. And He told His disciples that a boat should stand ready for Him because of the crowd, so that they would not crowd Him; for He had healed many, with the result that all those who had afflictions pressed around Him in order to touch Him. Whenever the unclean spirits saw Him, they would fall down before Him and shout, “You are the Son of God!” And He earnestly warned them not to tell who He was. (Mark 3:1–12)

When is the right time to do the right thing? Always. When it is within our power to right a wrong, to relieve suffering, to encourage, that’s when we can do it. There is no better time than now to be kind to another person. Whenever we see a need, then we can reach out and relieve it. Is there a bit of trash that needs to be disposed of properly? Did someone drop something that needs to have it picked up? Is there an elderly person needing help crossing a street? A foreign tourist lost and confused that needs directions? Nothing is more important than helping those who need help. Jesus was always willing to be inconvenienced. We would not think about how late we were for a meeting if we saw a child drowning. Instead, we would drop everything else in order to save that life.

For the Pharisee, people and their needs often took second place in their concern for legalistic requirements. The question that Jesus wants us to ask ourselves in every situation is very simple: is this the best thing I could do right now for this person?

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Why?

A man with leprosy came and knelt in front of Jesus, begging to be healed. “If you are willing, you can heal me and make me clean,” he said.

Moved with compassion, Jesus reached out and touched him. “I am willing,” he said. “Be healed!” Instantly the leprosy disappeared, and the man was healed. Then Jesus sent him on his way with a stern warning: “Don’t tell anyone about this. Instead, go to the priest and let him examine you. Take along the offering required in the law of Moses for those who have been healed of leprosy. This will be a public testimony that you have been cleansed.”

But the man went and spread the word, proclaiming to everyone what had happened. As a result, large crowds soon surrounded Jesus, and he couldn’t publicly enter a town anywhere. He had to stay out in the secluded places, but people from everywhere kept coming to him. (Mark 1:40–45)

The question for Jesus was never “are you able,” but rather it was always, “are you willing?” In the case of this particular leper, Jesus was willing and so he healed the man. The question before us is the same as the question of this leper and the heart revealed by his question. The leper was concerned not just for his desperate need, but with the will of God. He understood that the world was a bigger place than just his desire for healing. He knew that God’s will was more important than his own.

The suffering that happens in the world is not meaningless. God knows what is best for us and for the world as a whole. Whatever we face, it is all part of the grander scheme of things: God’s overall creation, a work of enormous beauty which we can see but a tiny corner of. What value or point there may be to what we must endure may never be clear to us. But like the leper, we should be willing to accept whatever God’s will might be, whether, as it was in the case of the leper, the fulfillment of our deepest longing, or whether it might be something else entirely. We do this because we trust that God is good and that he knows what is best. We can therefore safely choose to submit to God’s will and trust him, whatever the short term outcome might be for us.

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Being Prepared

“Then the kingdom of heaven shall be likened to ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Now five of them were wise, and five were foolish. Those who were foolish took their lamps and took no oil with them, but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. But while the bridegroom was delayed, they all slumbered and slept.

“And at midnight a cry was heard: ‘Behold, the bridegroom is coming; go out to meet him!’ Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. And the foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ But the wise answered, saying, ‘No, lest there should not be enough for us and you; but go rather to those who sell, and buy for yourselves.’ And while they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the wedding; and the door was shut.

“Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open to us!’ But he answered and said, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, I do not know you.’

“Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming.” (Matthew 25:1–13)

The Boy Scout motto is “be prepared.” Jesus’ parable about the ten virgins was about being prepared. Jesus compared the kingdom of heaven to ten virgins with lamps who went out to meet the bridegroom so that they could lead him to his bride. They had oil for their lamps, but only half of them carried extra.

Notice that all the virgins, both wise and foolish, fell asleep as they awaited their delayed bridegroom. Jesus’ point was not that we should be on constant alert. Rather, we need to always be ready.

The foolish virgins who did not bring any extra oil, ended up excluded from the wedding that followed. Paul writes that the wisdom of the world is foolishness while what seems foolish to the world is the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:20-21). In Jesus’ parable, the wise virgins are those who burdened themselves with what seemed to the foolish virgins unnecessary extra baggage. There was no reason to anticipate running out of oil.

Parables are not allegories, with each bit in them standing for something else. Rather, there is a “moral to the story.” The moral to the Jesus’ parable is simple: Jesus wants us to be prepared to wait for him a long time, however long that might be. And while we wait, he expects us to live according to his law of love.

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Kessel Run

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket was named after the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars—the ship that Harrison Ford’s character Han Solo claimed had “made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.” The Falcon 9 has been launched a total of seven times since 2010. It has not failed to reach orbit even once. In fact, on its fourth voyage into space one of the nine engines in its first stage failed. Chunks of that motor can be seen dropping away in the video—and yet the rocket still made it safely to orbit and delivered a cargo ship to the International Space Station. The cargo ship is called Dragon, named after the song Puff the Magic Dragon.

On September 29, 2013, the first of the new upgraded versions of the Falcon 9 was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base. Besides being bigger and more powerful, it will soon have the capability of flying the first stage back to its launch facility for reuse—a game changer for the rocket industry once it happens.

But the space launch business has already felt a serious disturbance in the Force, even before full reusability has been demonstrated. On December 3 a Falcon 9 delivered a satellite for SES (a Luxemburg based corporation) into a geosynchronous transfer orbit. Although the delivery of yet another telecommunication satellite designed to broadcast television signals may seem hardly important—so unremarkable that it probably never even made your evening newscast—for the rocket industry and telecommunication industry, the world has been changed forever.

How so?

For the last several years the United States has been losing in the business of launching commercial satellites. The U.S. dropped from 66 satellite launches in 1998 to zero in 201. Other players have taken our place and our jobs: primarily the Russians with their Proton, Dneiper, and Soyuz rockets and the Europeans with their Arianne 5. Even China, India and Japan have gained market share. What happened? The American launch industry simply priced itself out of business, to the point that even American companies had turned to the Russians and the Europeans. Only U.S. government missions have continued to use American rockets. For instance, when Direct TV and Dish Network needed to launch another satellite to provide TV signals to American consumers, they’ve mostly used the Russians to put their satellites up. Likewise, SirusXM Radio—the satellite radio company—used Russian rockets to launch their American-made satellites. When Las Vegas-based Bigelow Industries sent two test modules of their inflatable space stations into low Earth orbit, they used Russian Dneipers—rockets formerly designated the SS-18 Satan by NATO back in the Cold War era. The Dneiper was originally an ICBM designed to rain nuclear fire on American cities. Since then, the now capitalistic Russians have converted them into launch vehicles for commercial satellites.

And the reason that the Russians and the Europeans got all the satellite business was very simple: they beat all the American companies on price—by a significant margin.

But that all changed on December 3, 2013. At 5:41 PM Eastern Standard Time, a Falcon 9 took a 100 million dollar satellite belonging to the second largest telecommunications satellite company: SES of Luxemburg. They paid SpaceX less than 60 million dollars to put their expensive satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit: its low point is 183 miles and it high point is 50,000 miles (a quarter of the way to the moon). Now that it’s in that orbit, the satellite will fire its motors to circularize that orbit at 22,500 miles: a geosynchronous orbit, meaning that the satellite’s rotation around the Earth matches the rotation speed of the Earth, so that the satellite appears to be hovering over one spot above the Earth—in this case, a spot above southeastern Asia—twenty-four hours a day.

What made this an economic earthquake for the satellite launch business is the price of the launch. Sixty million dollars seems like a lot until you consider that the European Space Agency would charge close to 250 million dollars for their Arianne 5 to do the same thing. That’s right. SpaceX undercut the Europeans by nearly 200 million dollars. They undercut what the Russians can charge—and even the Chinese have expressed an inability to compete with SpaceX on price.

There’s a reason that NASA has selected SpaceX to fly cargo to the International Space Station and why they’d like them to eventually (probably by 2017 at the latest) to fly astronauts there. Currently the Russians charge the United States more than seventy million per person to take American astronauts to the International Space Station. With the retirement of the Space Shuttle, that’s the only way Americans can fly to space. Once SpaceX starts flying, however, the cost per seat in a Dragon—which can take seven people at a time—the per seat cost will drop to less than 20 million per person: nearly one-fourth the cost of relying upon the Russians.

Space X now has a backlog of over 50 launches scheduled for the next five years worth more than four billion dollars. The satellite launch business—with current annual revenues of about 35 billion dollars—is returning to America with a vengeance—along with the American jobs. Where the United States had become an insignificant bit player in commercial satellite launches, it could once again become dominant. The companies that have launched satellites up until now will either have to find a way to lower their prices to match what SpaceX has now demonstrated it can do—or else they will go out of business. The real Falcon can do a far better “Kessel Run” than its competitors.

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Being Good Dirt

Jesus left the house and went out beside Lake Galilee, where he sat down to teach. Such large crowds gathered around him that he had to sit in a boat, while the people stood on the shore. Then he taught them many things by using stories. He said:

A farmer went out to scatter seed in a field. While the farmer was scattering the seed, some of it fell along the road and was eaten by birds. Other seeds fell on thin, rocky ground and quickly started growing because the soil wasn’t very deep. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched and dried up, because they did not have enough roots. Some other seeds fell where thornbushes grew up and choked the plants. But a few seeds did fall on good ground where the plants produced a hundred or sixty or thirty times as much as was scattered. If you have ears, pay attention! (Matthew 13:1–9)

Good soil is fertile soil. Is there anything that the good soil does to become good soil? The soil does not work hard in order to produce a hundred times the amount of seed that was planted in it The soil does not plant the seed. The soil does not bring the rain.

The soil is simply the target for where the farmer throws the seed. The farmer is the one who does all the work. God is the farmer. We are soil. What we produce for God is because God gave the increase. All we need to do is be there for the farmer to use.

It is so easy to forget the nature of our relationship with God. The reason we belong to God is not because we did something. It’s because he did something. He bought us with the blood of his Son. Therefore, we simply respond to God. There is nothing more we can do. The purpose of the story of the farmer and his field is not to encourage us to work hard. Instead, it is to help us realize, to help us understand, that it is God who is hard at work in us. He is the one who plants and harvests. We are his field to do with as he wills and as he needs. We can be confident, therefore, since we are a fertile field, that we will produce the fruit that he has sown in us.

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What is Righteous?

As he taught, Jesus said, “Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely.”

Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny.

Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on.” (Mark 12:38-44)

The religious leaders wanted to be honored by people, even as they dishonored those around them. They claimed to love God, even as they hated those created in his image. The problems infesting the Israelite leadership were the same problems that had infested Israelite leadership throughout its history. Though they had given up idolatry for the worship of a single God, they still didn’t understand what it meant to be righteous. Prayer and tithing were good, but Jesus was concerned about their motivations.

Righteousness is not about giving money, or praying long prayers, or gaining the admiration of others. Instead, righteousness is all about loving God. And the way we love God is revealed by how we treat those who bring us no advantage, who cannot advance our careers, who cannot offer us money or prestige. As John wrote, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.” (1 John 4:20) How we treat the least of God’s people is how we are treating God. Our behavior toward those around us is a reflection of what we believe about God.

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