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November 1 - November 4, 2023
and Rachel. Hannah and Elkanah. Elizabeth and Zechariah. Each of them faces the awful fate of dying childless.
Once you have this in mind, the epic story of Abraham makes much more sense. He believed in God, but he and his wife Sarah were childless. God promised him the greatest of all blessings—a family that outnumbered the stars in the sky.
Why doesn’t the Bible ever discuss the idea of same-sex marriage, in either the Old or New Testament?
First, we assume that the overall goal of marriage is to satisfy romantic longings, and the purpose of a marriage covenant is to legitimize a sexual relationship. But throughout history, the purpose of marriage has been to covenantally establish a family, which would take care of its members when they got old and continue a family legacy. In a world where sterility was a disaster, marrying someone of the same sex was unthinkable.2
Jesus used the term eunuch to refer to those who are denied the very things that brought meaning and success in life—family and children.
In using the word eunuch, Jesus likely had kingdom imagery in mind, because many kings appointed only eunuchs to high offices. In order to serve a king, these men had to give up the hope of having a family. The very word eunuch carried both of these implications. Besides referring to a castrated man, by the first century it also carried the connotation of being a high royal official (see Esth. 2:3; Dan. 1:3; Acts 8:27). Jesus was saying that in the same way, some will be called to forgo marriage to serve in God’s kingdom. As shocking as this thought is in our culture, it would have been
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About 150 years before Christ, Jews were executed if they circumcised their sons in order to be faithful to God. As a reaction to the encroaching Gentile world, they put great emphasis on observing laws that separated them from Gentiles as a way to show their commitment to God.
He points out that Abraham himself was a Gentile, and that God’s promise was given to him because of his faith, before he was circumcised.
called “Your Personalized Bible”
which will insert your name in more than seven thousand verses?1 Here are a few verses from my copy:
Rather, he was telling the Corinthians that all together they were the temple of God, and that they were being built together into one dwelling place for his Spirit. Pagans had many temples, but the true God had only one. They were the “house,” the bayit that God had promised David—not just a structure but a lineage, a family. Paul’s focus was not on each person individually but rather on the body of believers as a whole.2
This scene gave me a new perspective on Jeremiah 29:11, “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’” (NIV), which I usually envision embroidered with a Precious Moments figure on a frilly pillow. Imagine hearing it in its original context, as it sounded to the Israelites who heard the words from Jeremiah’s lips during the Babylonian exile. The people had been torn from this beautiful land, and death and horror had consumed their nation. All God’s promises seemed utterly undone. After seeing their
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Jesus advised his disciples to take the bottom spot when they arrived at a banquet until they were invited to move up (Luke 14:8–11).
Individualism is highly prized in Europe, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America; in Africa, it is synonymous with unhappiness, with being accursed. African tradition is collectivism for only in a harmonious group could one face the obstacles thrown up by nature.3
Imagine that a stranger walks up to you and asks, “What’s your identity?” You could answer by saying “Mary Smith,” but your identity, your shem, is much bigger than that. It comes from your family, your education, your job, and how others perceive your status, your reputation, or your authority. To speak “in the name” of someone is to speak by his or her authority.
Collectivist cultures that emphasize “honor” and “shame” are really thinking in terms of shem in the biblical sense.
In many cultures, accepting Christ means giving up one’s family, heritage, prestige, and any chance of success.
According to Jewish scholar Jacob Milgrom, it was because of how it differentiated the priestly part of the community.7 Because both the priestly garments and the tabernacle weavings were a combination of wool and linen, it was prohibited for laypersons to dress in the same way. Another prohibited mixture had the same rationale. No one but the priests could blend together aromatic spices in the same combination that was used to make sacred anointing oil (Exod. 30:33).
so they were barred from dressing like priests or duplicating certain items used in worship. We actually have similar laws today. Did you realize that it’s illegal to dress up in a badge and a uniform to impersonate a police officer? The police are authorized to stop a car, break down a door, or handcuff a person—things no one else may do. Likewise, God had given priests the authority to lead worship, and they had to be noticeably different from everyone else.
During Jesus’ ministry, he also stressed that the appropriate response to God’s forgiveness is to extend it to others.
we’ve been forgiven a debt of ten thousand talents, we can’t shake down our debtors for a few denarii. We are to forgive as we have been forgiven, just as Israel was to release others in order to remember its own release from bondage. When we realize our sin and how much we have been set free from, and we share this overwhelming forgiveness with others, God will fill our lives with his love.
As hard as Westerners find it to relate to collective cultures, we actually do think more communally in the business world. Consider what happens when you’re hired into a company.
Finally, God, the deity-owner, promises to send in his own son to take charge as CEO and bring the company back in line with his plans. The board of directors, however, opposes his plan and plots to have his son bumped off instead. How will this scrappy little start-up achieve God’s outsized vision? Find out yourself in this spine-tingling corporate thriller.
God’s covenant family. Notice that Israel, as I’m using the word here, does not refer to the modern country, or to politics, or to any kind of detached, historical reference to a nation. Here I’m speaking in terms of the “family of Abraham” as the main character of the biblical story.
Just imagine, by some amazing grace, your relatives were the ones whom the true God covenanted with to proclaim himself to the world. When your family prospered, it showed God’s power, and when they were oppressed, God looked like a loser too. God’s fate is tied up with your fate. It’s galling and shocking to you how the world sees the God of Israel as a wimpy, pathetic deity when he’s the true Creator of the world. When is he going to be rightly acknowledged as the world’s true King? Every day it pains you to see your family languishing, oppressed by rock-worshiping idolaters. Not just for
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Too easily we condemn Jesus’ contemporaries for longing for a Messiah who is a military leader, a true Son of David.
The famous command, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart” (Deut. 6:5), is actually a command to the person of Israel—that, as a nation, Israel must love God with all its heart.
Another word that causes individualists difficulty is kingdom, even though Jesus preached absolutely nonstop about the kingdom.
When we look for the “gospel” in the Gospels we search for an individual message of salvation. Instead, Jesus was speaking in terms of redeeming a whole people.
if “Christ” means “God’s appointed King,” it implies that he rules over a kingdom,
To “accept Christ” is to “enter his kingdom,” an inheren...
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You can’t quit the kingdom without quitting the King. You may be a solitary, do-nothing member
In America, our individualism makes us ever more prone to privatized faith. A growing number of people see participation in the church as unnecessary and decide to drop out. Lots of tissues and organs in its body have decided to quit, and the rest of the church body struggles to function without them. Why do we wonder when it does poorly?
Rabbi Abraham Heschel concurs, declaring that modern readers lack an ability to appreciate the grandeur of God.
Greeks learned in order to comprehend. Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use. . . . To the modern man everything seems calculable; everything reducible to a figure. He has supreme faith in statistics and abhors the idea of a mystery. Obstinately he ignores the fact that we are all surrounded by things which we apprehend but cannot comprehend; that even reason is a mystery to itself. He is sure of his ability to explain all mystery away.
You need to “think small” in order to appreciate the impact of Exodus on its original audience.
He proved himself by duking it out with the mightiest deities they knew.
Each of the plagues was, in fact, a theological statement. Each was an assault on one of the terrifying gods of Egypt, showing the deity’s impotence compared to that of Israel’s God.7 God was revealing himself in the language that the ancient Near Eastern world understood, not that of modern Westerners.
The two miracles that God gave Moses to demonstrate to Pharoah, the staff that changed into a snake and the leprous hand, were both ones that the magicians could reproduce,
at least in part (7:20–24). The first two plagues they could replicate too (8:1–14). The third plague, a seemingly mild one where dust is turned to gnats, was when the magicians started to sweat. This, they declared, was the finger of God—none of their gods could create life!
In the ancient Near East, it was assumed that humanity was created to be the slaves of gods who were capricious and not terribly interested in their lives.
Until we grasp this ingrained sense of insignificance, we can’t appreciate how stunning the thought was that lowly humankind is somehow precious to God and of intimate concern to him: When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. (Ps. 8:3–5)
The fact that God has crowned us with glory has not changed the fact that we are “little.”
human life is precious to God. According to Nahum Sarna, the idea that humanity is precious to God was actually a prominent, startling theme in the Torah to its original audience in Moses’ time. It begins with a creation account that deliberately contradicts pagan myths. Instead of bloody tales of gods waging battles and chopping each other into bits to create the world, Genesis tells the story of the creation of humanity, who is created to be God’s image-bearer and appointed to reign over the world.9 We humans may be tiny, but we are exceedingly precious to God.
According to renowned scholar Moshe Greenberg, this is where the laws of Israel fundamentally diverged from those of other nations.10 Many of Israel’s distinctive laws were based on the peculiar and supreme value that God placed on human life. Unlike anywhere else, in Israel, murder was seen as an offense against God himself. Because humans were created in the image of God, they bore immense value to him. No amount of money could be exchanged for a life, because nothing could compensate for murder except for the life of the murderer himself. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his
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his own image.” (Gen. 9:6)
Notice that in biblical thinking, capital punishment is not ...
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One is wanton, malicious violence, the other is a penalty demanded by God for a heinous crime. Humanity is precious to God, but human life is not so supreme that even justice cannot demand ...
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say in how much life each one of us is given. If we destroy others, he can demand our...
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The idea that human life was uniquely precious to God was radical, unparalleled. To us it is second nature, but this was a shocking notion...
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