Month: December 2020

Week 50 Hebrews

Let’s say someone asked me this question: which NT book is the most frustrating one to read if I’ve never read the OT, and if I don’t know anything about the OT?
I’d be tempted to answer: the letter to the Hebrews. It would be in my top-three for sure. Hebrews is a log-jam of OT-isms.
For starters the title – saying who it’s written to – should be a big tip-off.
But then I start bumping into names: Abel, Abraham, Melchizedek, Esau, Levi, Judah, Aaron, Moses, Joshua, David. Chapter eleven alone mentions a dozen and a half OT people.
And I can’t avoid OT topics – the law, priests, the covenant, manna, the tabernacle, the ark of the covenant & holy of holies, the veil, animal sacrifices, the Sabbath, Zion, Jerusalem, Egypt, and like that.
I found fifty-seven verses in Hebrews that have OT quotes in them.
So anyway, if I don’t know anything about the OT I’m in for a long hour of reading in Hebrews.
Coming toward the end of the year I’m thinking about 2021. Will I try reading through again? Whenever I’m thinking about bible-reading there’s always two questions: a) am I going to read it, and b) am I going to read all of it or not? First there’s the decision – yes-I-am or no-I’m-not. And if I decide yes-I-am then there’s the action pieces – what and how?
As of today I’m figuring I’ll try to read through again in 2021.

Week 49 Hebrews

Right away the writer starts dividing things up into Thens & Nows.
Then: God…spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways.
Now: in these last days (God) has spoken to us in His Son.
Of the two you get the sense pretty quickly that the writer’s big concern is the Now – by the time he’s thirty words in he starts giving details about the Son, about Jesus Christ.
If I’d decided in August to jot down all the other things I found about the Lord after I’d finished the gospels I’d definitely be writing down things from Hebrews 1:
(God) has spoken to us through his Son
God promised everything to the Son as an inheritance
Through the Son (God) made the universe and everything in it
The Son reflects God’s own glory
Everything about (the Son) represents God exactly
(The Son) sustains the universe by the mighty power of his command.
These aren’t simple ideas. But this kind of information really bulks up what I learned about Jesus in the gospel stories. And since the gospels already showed me a pretty muscular Lord, some of this post-gospels material really piles on substance, complexity, and dimension. The outside-the-gospel writers supplement what I learned about the gospel-Lord. There’s more to him than meets the eye.
[I’d like to be more alert to that next time through.]

Note: quotes from Hebrews 1:1-2 (NASB) and 1:2-3 (NLT)

Week 49 Philemon

Paul wrote this letter to a man he already knew. The man hosted church meetings in his own home. He was Philemon.
The letter to Philemon was about a runaway slave named Onesimus. While he was on the lam he had come to belief in the Lord (probably after running into Paul). The ironic thing – and the reason Paul wrote about him – was that Philemon was the man Onesimus had escaped from. Philemon owned Onesimus!
You have to figure that Paul & Onesimus had some serious what-to-do-now conversations. In the end Onesimus decided he had to return to his master.
The interesting twist that Paul puts on Onesimus’ return to Philemon is that his slave is coming back: no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother.
Technically that wasn’t entirely true because believing in the Lord didn’t alter Onesimus’ legal status as a slave.
What Paul was driving at was that even though Onesimus was formally still in a state of institutional bondage, he was also more-than-a-slave.
In the first-century political-legal Roman world Onesimus was just as much a slave after he believed in the Lord as he was before. Belief didn’t work any social-status miracles for Onesimus in the material world.
What it did do was add a whole new dimension on the non-material side. Which would have been a ticklish thing for both Philemon and Onesimus. Legally master & slave; but brothers & equals in-the-Lord.

Note: quote from Philemon 16 (NASB)

Week 49 1 Timothy

Bible writers sometimes tell us exactly why they’re writing, and that’s what Paul does right in the middle of this letter. He tells Timothy he wrote: so that you will know how people must conduct themselves in the household of God. This is the church of the living God, which is the pillar and support of the truth.
So 1 Timothy was Paul’s Guide-to-Conduct-in-the-Church. I scanned backward and forward looking for what-all Paul included.
A few of the big-ticket items were:
prayer in the church
women in the church
leaders in the church
needy people in the church
conflict in the church
slaves in the church
money & wealth in the church, and
teaching in the church.
Some pretty interesting topics that make me regret that I’m hurrying to read through.
The church has all kinds: men and women, old & young, rich & poor, powerful & powerless. A mixed company, all of us more or less committed to the Lord, all of us part of the church of the living God, and all of us with our centrifugal pulls of gender, wealth, opinion, influence and age whirling away and pulling us apart.
It seems like a pretty shaky group. But Paul isn’t fooled, and calls it the pillar and support of the truth.

Note: quote from 1 Timothy 3:15 (NLT). I forgot my end of the month tally yesterday so checked today: I’ve read 1662 of 1730 pages. 96% finished in 92% of the year.