Category Archives: New Testament

Wednesday with John – Some Thing More

Posted on March 23, 2022 | Leave a comment

John 5:1 After this there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 2 Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Aramaic called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. 3 In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. 5 One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 6 When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” 7 The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” 8 Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” 9 And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked. ESV 

What is the general theme of the passage?
The name Bethesda means either house of mercy or house of grace but it seems improbable that pool has any religious connection to the God of the Jews OR that the people there, were waiting for Israel’s God to heal them, especially on this Sabbath day.  Some versions have added to the ending of verse 3 and all of verse 4.  In many versions this addition is only a footnote a because the ancient manuscripts do not make that connection.  This pool would likely have always been a place of uncleanness to the Jews because “a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed were there.” The mystery of this water is healing happens only when the water is “stirred up.”  

What does it say about God (or Jesus or the Holy Spirit?)
Jesus chooses to go to this pool to find this man. It seems so similar to what He chose to do when he offered “living” water to the outcast woman at the well.  Jesus’s assurance is “My Father is working until now, and I am working” even on the Sabbath.

What does it say about people?
Here are some questions to read and ponder: Why did the crippled man not just say “yes” when Jesus asked him “Do you want to be healed?”  If he IS a Jew, what’s he doing there on the Sabbath?  If he’s NOT a Jew, why did he go to the Temple after his healing?  This invalid man may be yet another story of someone who is not necessarily Godless, but not Godly either.  He knows some of the essentials: the water in this pool is identified with the grace and mercy of some mysterious power.  He knows there is some miraculous healing possible. He knows he needs some thing more, some one who can get him to that “stirred up” water.

Is there truth here for me?
How many times has this man been taken to this same pool and been disappointed?  Jesus is not just the some one who will put that invalid into the pool to be healed.  HE IS the “stirred up” water”  that man cannot reach on his own.  Jesus has given that invalid man the one  thing that pool could never offer, a healing that is something more — a connection to Him.  Jesus is the missing verse 4! 

a “waiting for a certain movement of the water, for an angel of the Lord came from time to time and stirred up the water. And the first person to step in after the water was stirred was healed of whatever disease he had.”

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Exodus [The Road Out] — The Rock

Posted on March 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

Exodus 33:18 Moses said, “I pray thee, show me thy glory.” 19 And he[the Lord] said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name ‘The Lord’; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face; for man shall not see me and live.”

“Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee”

21 And the Lord said, “Behold, there is a place by me where you shall stand upon the rock; 22 and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; 23 then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”

The old hymn, Rock of Ages, is what inspired my painting.  God chose to reveal the truth of His moral code, written from His heart on a surface physically made by His own hand.  Can you imagine the Lord of all Creation busily speaking every perfect thing into reality; and yet purposefully carving broken fissures and clefts into that solid, immovable mass of rock and calling it “good?” 

We don’t have those stone tablets but we still have the ten truths for life that were on them.  Can you imagine the permanence of God’s message as much more than two [or four] lost tablets but a message from the stone itself?  Those Words have never been lost!  Instead they have become a good and perfect place to hide as the Lord of all Creation passes by to reveal Himself amid the broken fissures and clefts. It’s a very different solid, permanent and immovable place of safety from which to witness the Glory we cannot bear to see — THE Rock.

Trust in the Lord forever,
for the Lord God is an everlasting rock.
Isaiah 26:4

 

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Wednesday with John – Advantage Takers

Posted on March 16, 2022 | Leave a comment

32 DAYS TO EASTER!

John 4:43 After the two days [in Samaria]  he [Jesus] departed for Galilee. 44 (For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown.) 45 So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast. For they too had gone to the feast. ESV

What is the general theme of the passage?
Jesus has narrowed the scope of his influence by moving from the big city of Jerusalem, through the in-between place of Samaria, to zero in on His home territory.  Jesus isn’t fooled into assuming the basis of the welcome in Galilee is prompted by anything more than the “actions speak louder than words” stories of His time in Jerusalem.  Those miracle-working realities are meant to be actions that emphasize the Words of truth behind them.  His recent time in Samaria shows us the stark contrast of the “Samaritans welcoming Jesus because of His Words and the people of Galilee focused on the signs and wonders.”a

What does it say about God (or Jesus or the Holy Spirit?) Jesus has come to His home for one prophetic purpose: to help those who could not see past the power His actions to hear and recognize the truth of His Words. 

What does it say about people?
People are advantage-takers and Jesus has come home for the express purpose to give the people in His home territory the opportunity to take advantage of Him.

Is there truth here for me?
I wrote that line above about Jesus giving the opportunity to take advantage of Him as a play on words before it actually dawned on me how true those words were. Jesus is just 32 days from this year’s reminder that He has overcome a desperately broken and negative sin of humanity – to be users of each other and God.  Easter is the action He took to speak the reality of His Words and His Spirit into my past, my present and my future so that I might recognize His purpose for me is to take full advantage of Him and never be satisfied with anything less.

a https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/go-your-son-will-live

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Exodus [The Road Out] – Jesus

Posted on March 13, 2022 | Leave a comment

Exodus 32:7 And the Lord said to Moses, “Go down; for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves; RSV

It’s easy to see how obvious the idolatry of THOSE people is.  How in the world could they miss that the golden calf looked just like the idol the Egyptians worshipped? These are the same people who’d repeatedly sworn to Moses that whatever God told them to do, they would do.  These are the people who knew they were to serve God on this mountain.  These are the people who were willing to settle for making the Glory of God into their own image.

Imagine the heartbreak Moses must have felt as he began his journey down the mountain after being told by the Lord “Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves.”    Therein lies the lesson of how waiting, suspicion and impatience can so easily become the sin that corrupts the mind first and then the heart.  This golden calf was made from the willing offering of the people’s treasure.  Their treasure was what they chose to worship as the god that brought them out of Egypt even though only one day before that idol hadn’t even existed.  

The challenge of my mind and heart as a descendant of THOSE people, who’s inherited this sad and shameful moment as part of my history, is to find the thread that connects those truths to the truth of the Sovereign and Eternal Glory of God revealed in Jesus for believers today. “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin,[as a sin offering] he condemned sin in the flesh,  in order that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” Romans 8

“Fallen people are capable of great sacrifices,
but not out of love for God.”
 John Piper

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Wednesday with John – In Between

Posted on March 9, 2022 | Leave a comment

John 4:39 Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s  testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of your words that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world.” RSV

What is the general theme of the passage?
I suppose because I’m studying both John and Exodus at the same time, this familiar story seems like another story about an exodus to me – the road out of a wilderness on the journey home. Jesus has chosen this direct route that connected the wilderness with the tainted land of Samaria on his way home to Galilee.  Somehow that seems important.  Jesus’s own baptism and the place of God’s proclamation of His Sonship took place in that Judean wilderness.  That is also the place Satan hoped, and failed, to disgrace both Jesus and God with desperate temptations about food, faith and power.  Jesus survived that wilderness and now He’s become the saving link for Samaria, the “in-between” place, filled with people who’ve lost their right to even claim the title “Jew” and He can offer them a greater Home. 

What does it say about God (or Jesus or the Spirit?)
Jesus was able to combine their remembered facts with experience and truth in a way that reached into the history of their heart to turn their facts into faith that He was their way out of that “in-between” place. 

What does it say about people?
The practical truth about Jesus is that He is God and capable of saving people caught “in between” their wilderness and their true Home.  The woman at the well knows old “facts” but is less interested in instructions about eternity than she is in not having to haul water every day.  She acknowledges “our father Jacob, who gave us the well” and “our fathers worshiped on this mountain.”  She obviously has knowledge that affects her mind without her having a conscious awareness her facts are the “kindling” of faith. One new fact has ignited something of faith for her,  “He told me all that I ever did.”

Is there truth here for me? I thought about my own moment of recognizing Jesus, and all the “facts” I’d had for a long time before that day came.  Doubt was not my wilderness, I believed those facts!  But someone else’s facts are only the “in-between” part of faith.  It’s when Jesus enters the “in-between” and turns facts into kindling that ignites faith that you recognize you’ve survived the wilderness and have a Home to aim for.

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Exodus [The Road Out] – The Blood

Posted on March 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

Exodus 24:1-8

He [The Lord] said
Come —
Aaron, Nadab, and Abhiu, and seventy of the elders
and worship afar off.
Moses alone shall come near
and the people shall not come up with him.
Moses came and told
all the words of the Lord and all the ordinances.
The people answered with one voice
“All the words which the Lord has spoken we will do.”

Moses wrote all the words of the Lord,
and built an altar at the foot of the mountain.
He sent young men of the people of Israel,
who offered burnt offerings
and sacrificed peace offerings of oxen to the Lord.
Moses took half of the blood,
he threw against the altar.
He took the book of the covenant,
and read it in the hearing of the people.
They said,
“All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient.”
Moses took the blood and threw it upon the people
and said,
“Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord
has made with you in accordance with all these words.” RSV

The contrast between the Lord’s instruction for some to come and worship “afar off” but that Moses alone should “come near” was the thing that caught my attention.  That separation is such a different idea than what we understand when Jesus says “Come to me ALL who are weary…”   My modern-day heart is looking for clues from this episode of “back to the future”  because I recognize that contrast still exists.  “Afar off” was the trigger phrase that reminded me these people are homeless, weary prodigals,  people who want, even need, to worship but they are lost in the circumstances of life. This is the Word of the Lord, and He’s the only one who knows the future.

Moses took half of the blood,
he threw against the altar.
Moses took the blood and threw it upon the people
and said,
“Behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord
has made with you in accordance with all these words.”

The unpleasant visceral images of Moses’s application of that long-ago gory, blood sacrifice as part of worship have done their work in reminding me there are two important truths about blood sacrifice that have forever changed the future for ALL prodigals and I see the reality of them for today.  Jesus IS the Blood of Sacrifice that identifies both the PLACE of worship and the the PEOPLE who  worship there.

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Wednesday with John + The Locus

Posted on March 2, 2022 | Leave a comment

John 3:22-30 NIV

Jesus and his disciples
spent some time
and baptized.
John also was baptizing
This was before John was put in prison
An argument developed
over the matter of ceremonial washing.
They came to John and said
the one you testified about
is baptizing,everyone is going to him.
John replied, “A person can receive only
what is given them from heaven.
I am not the Messiah
The friend who attends the bridegroom waits and listens for him,
That joy is mine,
He must become greater; I must become less.

• What is the general theme of the passage?
This is the same desert place where Jesus’s triumphed over His own temptations. That fact, and this place has now become the meaningful locus of the ministry of these two cousins that begins to merge their parallel tracks into the Cross of Christ.  There is some competitive controversy brewing between John’s disciples and a certain Jew[?].  Was baptism a process for purification by the symbolic removal of things determined by a set of rules that made you unclean OR was it an action of repentance with sincere regret and remorse for the unclean things only the heart knew?  John clearly settles the controversy with his own recognition of the greatness of Christ and His joy that he’s been given his role as the friend who attends the bridegroom.

• What does it say about God (or Jesus or the Spirit?) It’s year one of both Jesus’s and John’s ministry.  Jesus has been baptized by John who identified Him as the one sent from God.  Jesus has been through the preparation of His own temptations. Peter, Andrew, Philip and Nathanael have been called, the water has been turned into wine, the temple has been cleared and Jesus has begun his ministry of transforming faith from a corporate expression of worship to a personal one with a nighttime conversation with Nicodemus. 

• What does it say about people?
Human nature is competitive and competition can breed controversy.  The desire to control circumstances of obedience and observance happens because of the parallel tracks of faith and personal behavior. 

• Is there truth here for me?
Reading about Judea being the place Jesus returned after His own temptations made me think about my own baptism.  I was about 12, but it was a meaningless process until I met Jesus twenty-one years later. That was my own time in the desert of temptations that made me realize life is like parallel tracks for many of us who know there IS a God but that’s about it!  I knew enough to want to try to keep those two tracks somewhat parallel but still didn’t recognize that was my desert until the action of a repentant heart revealed there was more to life than  being “not Godless, but not Godly either.” That’s when my two parallel lines began to merge into the locus that looks more and more like a Cross to me.

 

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Exodus [The Road Out] – Direct Access

Posted on February 27, 2022 | Leave a comment

Exodus 19:1 On the third new moon after the people of Israel had gone forth out of the land of Egypt, on that day they came into the wilderness of Sinai. 2 And when they set out from Rephidim and came into the wilderness of Sinai, they encamped in the wilderness; and there Israel encamped before the mountain. 3 And Moses went up to God, and the Lord called to him out of the mountain, saying, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: 4 You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. 5 Now therefore, if you will obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my own possession among all peoples; for all the earth is mine, 6 and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words which you shall speak to  the children of Israel.”

This is my poetic representation of God’s word using verbatim phrases from this portion of Exodus 19 with the goal of seeing the place God is creating for Jesus.  I have the advantage of hindsight and knowing the reality of God’s desire is to make a place for Himself within the people of His own heart.  Moses hoped the Instructions God gave him to give to the people he’d led to this mountain would become a convenient working arrangement between them, but God had something greater in mind.  He intended those Ten Words to become the promise of direct priestly access. 

The third new moon after
the land of Egypt,
they came into the wilderness of Sinai.
There Israel encamped before the mountain.
Moses went up to God.
The Lord called to him
saying, Thus you shall say –
You have seen what I did
how I bore you on eagles’ wings
and brought you to myself.
Now therefore,
if you will obey my voice
and keep my covenant,
you shall be my own possession among all peoples
you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. RSV

It’s taken three months to get to this place of wilderness at the foot of the Mountain of God. “The word conventionally translated ‘wilderness’ is not a sandy desert, but grazing country, not settled by man.”a  Some scholars believe God has brought Moses back to the same place of the burning bush where He first spoke audibly to Moses.  Now Moses has heard the voice of God for a second time and been given the Ten Commands from God that are meant to offer tired, hungry, irritable and lost people a place of worship where they will finally have direct access to God within their memory, their mind and their heart.  Come, Lord Jesus!

aEnduring Word commentary

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Wednesday with John – Conversation

Posted on February 23, 2022 | Leave a comment

John 3:1 Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. 2 This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him.” 3 Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” 4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? …7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born anew.’ 8 The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.” …16 For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

What is the general theme of the passage?
It’s like Nicodemus and Jesus are having a conversation about two different things.  Nicodemus wants Jesus to know he knows the corporate “we” position: “we” recognize your position with God because of the signs you do.  It’s an odd conversation because Jesus responds to Nicodemus as if he’s answering a question about the Kingdom of God rather than replying to a statement about faith.  Jesus has answered that unasked question to help Nicodemus figure out his “personal” position with God, even if it means going back to square one and learning about love, faith and relationship with God, as if you’re a new born baby.

What does it say about God (or Jesus or the Holy Spirit?
Jesus answers questions of faith our hearts don’t know enough to ask. Jesus has Kingdom answers for our unasked questions that will remind us that new birth is the reality of  our faith and our continued growth.  

What does it say about people?
We’re confused about our faith and what to expect from it.  Our hearts and minds fool us into depending on what “we” know as the basis of our faith rather than our personal relationship with Jesus.

Is there truth here for me?
Keeping the conversation with Jesus going will answer the Kingdom questions I don’t know enough to ask…yet!  I have physical senses that let me feel and hear the wind and I have Spiritual senses [born of the Spirit] so I can understand the difference between a comfortable breeze and a brewing storm in life and in faith — “so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.”  

Check out this resource on John 3:16.  I feel safe in guaranteeing you will never “breeze” through that verse casually again after investing your time in John Piper’s four labs on John 3:16

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Exodus [The Road Out] – Remember!

Posted on February 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

Exodus 13:3 And Moses said to the people, “Remember this day, in which you came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage, for by strength of hand the Lord brought you out from this place; no leavened bread shall be eaten. 4 This day you are to go forth, in the month of Abib. 5 And when the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Hivites, and the Jeb′usites, which he swore to your fathers to give you, a land flowing with milk and honey, you shall keep this service in this month…9 And it shall be to you as a sign on your hand and as a memorial between your eyes, that the law of the Lord may be in your mouth; for with a strong hand the Lord has brought you out of Egypt…18 But God led the people round by the way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea. And the people of Israel went up out of the land of Egypt equipped for battle…

Remember…
“by strength of hand the Lord brought you out.”
Remember…

 

Memory of the Lord walking with us is still “the road out” of bondage!  The Israelites began their journey with the promise of an oasis, a land flowing with milk and honey.  But between their bondage in Egypt and that land of freedom lay a vast wilderness with other less obvious adversaries they would have to conquer.  Remember, their battle wasn’t just with an Egyptian army, a sea, a lack of water, unfamiliar food, dietary restrictions and years in a vast wilderness, but with themselves.  The Lord’s plan was to equip their memory by His faithful presence for an ongoing battle against the unrelenting, hidden influences of the other enemies that must be met and overcome along the way: the Hittites, broken and fearful, the Amorites, bitter, broken and babbling and the wicked Hivites. “And the Lord went before them” leading them by day and by night.  Remember!

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