Month: November 2020

Week 49 1 Timothy

While I’ve been reading-through this year I’ve had one Big Focus – to read everything right through. But back in about February I decided to tack on a secondary exercise, and that was to record verses that said something about what the Lord is like.
So I struck gold in chapter one. Paul is talking to Timothy but then it’s like all-of-a-sudden he’s addressing the Lord: now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever.
I think Paul is mainly showing respect for the Lord here, but in the process he names specific features about him.
I added three to my What’s-the-Lord-Like list:
The Lord is eternal, there’s a Permanency of Existence quality;
The Lord is invisible. A spirit doesn’t register on my optic nerves (so if seeing-is-believing then I’m in trouble); and,
The Lord is unique; there’s just nothing else to compare him to.
I haven’t tried subdividing my list but if I did I’d put these three under something like Difference-Emphasizing Qualities. All of them tend to put quite a bit of distance between the Lord and me – actually quite-a-bit-more than quite-a-bit. The discrepancy between us gives me a sense of unease.
Still, feeling unease about the Super-Qualities of the Lord isn’t a deal-breaker for me because I figure that the more closely I could identify him & me the less & less like God he becomes.

Note: quote from 1 Timothy 1:17 (NASB)

Week 48 2 Thessalonians

People in the church in Thessalonica discovered that believing in the Lord included getting bashed by some of the people around them. So Paul started his letter by consoling them. He also told them: God will use this persecution to show his justice. For he will make you worthy of his kingdom…and in his justice he will punish those who persecute you.
It looks to me like there are two things going on. The first is that persecutees will in some way be made more worthy by going through hardships. But I leave that idea and move on to the second thing – that persecutors will be punished.
That gets my attention because Paul says that persecutors: will be punished with everlasting destruction, forever separated from the Lord.
Which seems to me like an awful outcome. I wonder how I would feel being in a lonesome, changeless state of isolation, of being cut off, and of remaining exactly and perpetually who-I-am-right-now from now on. Doesn’t seem so good to me.
On the other hand maybe that’s just my way of thinking. Maybe a person who currently thinks of the Lord as a kind of gargoylian monstrosity will in future get to go on thinking the same thing forever – a sort of continuity-of-belief. Maybe the afterlife just locks in and kind of petrifies what I think and am now. A rigor mortis of the soul.

Note: quotes from 2 Thessalonians 1:5-6, 9 (NLT)

Week 48 1 Thessalonians

Paul has a pretty interesting section about the Lord coming back to earth to wrap everything up. Eighteen verses running from the end of chapter four on into chapter five.
Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly why writers choose certain topics, say certain things. I wonder why Paul told them: we who are still living when the Lord returns will not rise to meet him ahead of those who are in their graves.
I’m sitting thinking about the phrase ahead-of-those, wondering why Paul said that.
Were people in Thessalonica concerned that the living would get an advantage? That the dead were handicapped because they’re dead? (In a material world you’d be inclined to think that a live guy would just, by definition have a clear jump on a dead guy.)
I’m wondering if Paul is reassuring them that living people won’t get a head start, that being dead doesn’t disadvantage me at the resurrection.
He spells it out this way: the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. All together.
Anyway even though I’m not exactly sure what the question-behind-the-answer was, that doesn’t really jam me up because I’m pretty solid on two basic things: a) the Lord will come back to earth; and b) if we believe in him we’ll go to be with him.

Note: quotes from 1 Thessalonians 4:15 (NLT), 4:16-17 (NASB)

Week 48 1 Thessalonians

Paul is thinking back to his arrival in the Macedonian city and says: when you received from us the word of God’s message, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which performs its work in you who believe.
When Paul got to Thessalonica nobody – as far as I know – knew who he was. No one knew his reputation as a high-profile apostle, or suspected he’d go on to have maybe a bigger influence on the church than anyone for two-thousand years. He was just a guy who showed up and gave a public address. And the people listening to him had a decision to make. Either this is just a speech the guy made up out of his own brain, or it’s a message from God.
Nine times out of ten you’ll think that the guy just made-it-up. Messages from God are pretty rare, pretty unlikely.
But for some reason people there in Thessalonica believed Paul. You wonder why someone starts believing in the Lord. Quits believing what he believed and starts believing what he didn’t.
The decision was theirs to make and some of them decided to turn from their idols and serve the living and true God.
A pretty momentous decision. You wonder what made them do it.

Note: quote from 1 Thessalonians 2:13 (NASB), 1:9 paraphrased

Week 48 1 Thessalonians

The church was in the city of Thessalonica. I remember the back-story of how Paul & Silas landed in a Philippian jail. When they got out they headed for Thessalonica.
I check my bible atlas. Thessalonica was probably a port town, tucked right up at the end of a big gulf on the north-western shoulder of the Aegean Sea. Looking east I see Apollonia, then Amphipolis, and then Philippi (maybe about two hundred crow-flying kilometres east of Thessalonica). The Thessalonica story in Acts says that Paul spoke to people in one of the synagogues. Some Jewish people believed in the Lord, and so did: a large group of godly Greek men and also many important women of the city. A mixed congregation.
The Acts story adds a sequel about an angry mob accusing Paul & Silas of insurrection. But in his letter Paul doesn’t make a big deal about getting run out of town. He focuses on what happened to the people who believed: you turned away from idols to serve the true and living God. And…you are looking forward to the coming of God’s Son from heaven.
It’s a condensed version, a synopsis of a believing person’s life. I realize my favourite idols aren’t any good to me; I turn away from them so that I’m facing the true and living God; and now I’m looking in the right direction for the Lord when he comes back from heaven.

Note: quotes from Acts 17:4, 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10 (NLT)

Week 48 Colossians

One benefit of reading through is that if I’m thinking about a topic and want to get a better idea of what-all the bible says about it then I get to track that idea all the way through…beginning to end.
I’ve been trying to keep a list of what the bible says about God. When I get to Colossians I see this: Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. So I record that God is invisible. I can’t see him.
In the material world we put quite a bit of weight on what we can see. Something I can see is way up on my believability scale. Invisible things? Way down. The demand for visibility is pretty strong. If I can’t see something then I’m asking: does it even exist? Seeing is believing.
Which means that God not being visible puts some downward pressure on the Believability Quotient.
But that’s all beside the point. I’m tracking what the bible does say about God, not what I think it should. And it says here that he’s invisible.

Note: quote from Colossians 1:15 (NLT). Because my What-is-God-Like list focuses on God and not Christ I’m most interested in the God-is-invisible part of this verse. But to tell you the truth I think I’m cheating a bit there. I think Paul’s big idea is that the invisible God – after a long stint of invisibility – is visible-ized starting in Matthew. The main point? The Lord Christ imagizes the invisible God.

Week 47 Philippians

One of my reading-through rules is: don’t look back!
But yesterday Paul said: don’t worry about anything . And since I was worried about something today I broke the rule and looked back.
I looked back at not worrying about anything.
On the surface Don’t Worry About Anything is a kind of nice sentiment. It even sounds like it has substance. But as a free-standing, independent slogan it’s not really too helpful or useful. It tells me not to feel what I’m feeling. Not be what I’m being. And not much else.
Today I notice that verse six isn’t just four words long after all. Paul started with the four words: Don’t Worry About Anything. But then he went right on to add:
instead pray about everything
tell God what you need
thank him for all he has done.
So Paul is offering me an Anxiety Alternative.
He’s not saying don’t worry and just try to be happy.
He’s saying an if and a then – if you’re worried then you should pray to the Lord. According to Paul prayer is an actionable alternative to anxiety.
He seems to be saying that once I recognize I’m anxious I can take the step of telling the Lord, and even thanking him.
Speaking to the Lord is an Anxiety Management Tool.

Note: quote from Philippians 4:6 (NLT). And verse seven goes on to promise an alternative outcome, an anxiety replacement.

 

Week 47 Philippians

In the final chapter there’s a phrase I’d underlined sometime before: be anxious for nothing. It caught my attention.
I wondered what it said in a different version. A guy I know left a beat-up old bible at my place quite awhile ago and never asked for it back. So I got it and looked up the verse: do not be anxious about anything. (The guy had highlighted different sentences here-and-there in his bible – blocks of text in blue, yellow, pink, green, orange. He’d used a blue marker on verse six.)
I looked at another version: don’t worry about anything. (Someone who used that bible at some point had circled verse six.)
I remember that the Lord said something like this back in August so I checked: don’t worry about everyday life.
The Lord then, and Paul now seem to be saying that when I come to belief in the Lord anxiety is not really supposed to be part of the mix – I don’t just convert my pre-religious anxieties to new religious ones. Anxiety is one of things I’m dragging along from my former life, my life before-the-Lord.
Still, for me it’s a nearly impossible thing not to feel, nearly impossible not to be anxious, and I finish chapter four with the same uneasy feeling I had back in Matthew in August, a bit anxious about how I hang onto anxiety.

Note: quotes from Philippians 4:6 (NASB, NIV, NLT) and Matthew 6:25 (NLT)

Week 47 Philippians

In chapter three Paul is thinking back to some of the benefits he’d had – good family, social class, education, status, employment. Things like that.
Under normal circumstances we chalk those up as advantageous.
But now Paul’s rethinking the traditional advantage-disadvantage calculus. He’s expanding its scope; adding another factor. He says: I once thought all these things were so very important, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the priceless gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
I get a sheet of paper and draw a table with two columns. The left-hand column is headed: Low Value, and the right column says: High Value. In Paul’s Comparative Value Table the right-hand column only has room for one item: knowing the Lord. Everything else goes on the left.
No matter how many really good things – all the under-normal-circumstances High Value things – that I’ve got going for me…all of them go under Low Value.
Of course it’s not an absolute scale (fortunately). It’s a comparative one. And the key thing for me to keep in perspective is that knowing the Lord is so stupendously, astronomically, titanically, gigantesquely more valuable than all my other advantages, skills, efforts and benefits combined that, by comparison everything else is more-or-less valueless.

Note: quote from Philippians 3:7-8 (NLT)

Week 47 Philippians

There was conflict in the church in Philippi and so Paul offered some conflict-reduction advice. Three verses – seven quick-hitters – on unity-in-the-community. The one that slowed me down a bit was: be humble, thinking of others as better than yourself.
Humble is easier to read and say than be.
Anyway Paul went on to use an example of someone being humble. The Lord!
I thought back to the four gospels and remembered stories about the Lord teaching, advising, helping, healing. But now Paul is telling me a kind of preface, a back story:
Though he was God, he did not…cling to his rights as God
He made himself nothing
He took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form
And in human form he obediently humbled himself even further by dying.
The humbling of the Lord. The Great Reduction.
So this is a bit of a Supplement to the Gospels, something to add to the gospel-story mix. In all his teaching, advising, helping, healing, in all his fame and notoriety the Lord was operating as a slave. A giant step-down from majesty.
And getting back to his original point Paul wonders why I should be surprised at having to be humble-as-a-slave.
By comparison to the Lord it’s only a Little Reduction for me. Still, it’s a very hard thing to do.

Note: quotes from Philippians 2:3, 6-8 (NLT)