Month: September 2021

Week 36 Matthew

The Lord repeats the phrase six times in chapter five: you have heard…but I say. He was referring to the OT. What he thought about it.
I’m kind of glad to see that the Lord didn’t say the OT was useless and should be dumped (after all…I spent eight months reading it).
The Lord wasn’t flip-flopping the rules either. He didn’t say: Moses says, ‘Don’t murder people’…but I’m saying that you can!
What it looks like is that the Lord accepted the OT. The OT was essentially okay. His point was that it had been misunderstood. Maybe even misapplied. Trivialized. Mismanaged.
Moses gave the basic don’t-murder-people rule. The Lord’s supplement was: if you are angry with someone, you are subject to judgment. It’s like the Lord got out a map and surveyed all the points along the road to Murder. There were places on that road that were technically legal – for instance Hating. But in the Lord’s view they were all legitimately judgeable.
The OT isn’t being devalued in chapter five. The Lord isn’t saying that I can trash the OT law. More like: keep the law in the way it was originally meant to be kept.
When you get right down to it the OT’s version of the law was simpler than the Lord’s. He was actually amplifying the law. Complicating it. Intensifying it. The OT legal regime was pretty clean & straightforward. Then the Lord got his hands on it.

Note: quote from Matthew 5:22 (NLT)

Week 36 Matthew

Sometimes when I’m reading-through I make up exercises to help keep my mind on track – I’ll find a topic that interests me and look for all the places a writer talks about it.
Matthew six gave me a good idea for an exercise – it was to look for things that the Lord taught (I could call it: What Lessons Did the Lord Teach?)
The Sermon on the Mount is a long teaching passage. Right away I saw eight kinds of people who would be blessed by the Lord. They are people:
who realize their need of the Lord
who mourn
who are gentle and lowly
who are hungry and thirsty for justice
who are merciful
whose hearts are pure
who work for peace
who are persecuted because they live for God
One good thing about putting together a list like this is that it helps focus my attention.
On the downside this list might be pretty demoralizing. For example I sat looking at these eight things and did a quick personal inventory. I didn’t check off too many boxes.
I’d be in way better shape if I could get away with just recording the list. But at the end of his sermon the Lord said: anyone who listens to my teaching and obeys me is wise…but anyone who hears my teaching and ignores it is foolish.

Note: quotes from Matthew 5:3-10 & 7:24-26 (NLT)

Week 36 Matthew

Back in the OT Isaiah had forecast that: the land of Zebulun and Naphtali will soon be humbled, but there will be a time in the future when Galilee of the Gentiles, which lies along the road that runs between the Jordan and the sea, will be filled with glory… (then Isaiah explained that promise).
Many years later Jesus moved to Capernaum. Matthew says that that relocation fulfilled Isaiah’s old prophecy: in the land of Zebulun and of Naphtali, beside the sea, beyond the Jordan River – in Galilee where so many Gentiles live – the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light…
I look at a map of the original land distribution in Joshua. Zebulun-Naphtali are up near the top of the map – west of the Sea of Chinnereth. I flip to a map of NT times. The Sea of Chinnereth is renamed the Sea of Galilee and there on the lakeshore is the town of Capernaum. This seems like a pretty decent prediction Isaiah made. The prophecy might be a little unfocussed around the edges but what are the odds of having someone he called wonderful-counselor mighty-God everlasting-father and prince-of-peace come north to live on the shores of Galilee?
I don’t know for sure. But it looks like some pretty great and luminous man from the family line of David has to show up in the region of the Sea of Galilee or else Isaiah is wrong.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 9:1-2, 6-7 & Matthew 4:15-16 (NLT)

Week 35 Matthew

Reading-through is a solitary exercise. I do it alone. But at the same time it’s a together-aloneness because lots of other people have read the bible. The apostles read the OT. Saint Augustine and Martin Luther and Catherine of Siena read the bible. Millions of people have.
Matthew four is a kind of unwelcome reminder to me that even though the bible-readers’ fraternity I belong to includes the Lord it also includes the devil. In the story of the temptation of Christ the devil tried tempting the Lord three times.
What I see first is that the Lord was very familiar with the bible because in each of the temptations he quoted OT passages to answer the devil.
What I see second is that the devil knew the bible too because he quoted a passage from Psalm 91.
There’s some general conclusions I come to:
a) good people read the bible;
b) evil people read the bible;
c) reading the bible doesn’t mean I’m a good guy;
d) there’s legitimate ways to use the bible;
e) there’s illegitimate ways to use the bible;
f) if I haven’t read the bible for myself I might get buffaloed by someone who has;
g) quoting what the bible says isn’t necessarily saying what the bible means.
But I think my big take-away is that the devil reads & knows the bible and (it looks like) he might be prepared to use it against me.

Week 35 Matthew

A group of astronomer-astrologers appeared in King Herod’s court and asked: where is the newborn king of the Jews? We have seen his star as it arose, and we have come to worship him. That wasn’t good news and the king was: deeply disturbed by their question. Herod called in top Jewish religious specialists and asked them only one geographic question: where did the prophets say the Messiah would be born?
They told him that the prophetic forecast said: O Bethlehem of Judah, you are not just a lowly village in Judah, for a ruler will come from you who will be the shepherd for my people Israel. So the Messiah had to be born in Bethlehem.
I paged back to the Micah cross-reference: but you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, are only a small village in Judah. Yet a ruler of Israel will come from you, one whose origins are from the distant past…
I checked a map in the back of my bible to see how many cities were in Israel in Micah’s time. I counted about 55 west of the Jordan River. I think that’s a low estimate so if Micah was just picking a name out-of-a-hat then he had no better than a 1-in-55 probability of getting it right. His percentage chance would be low. Bethlehem was a longshot.
I’m impressed that Micah got it right. A Messiah born in Jezreel wouldn’t be the Messiah.

Note: quotes from Matthew 2:2, 3, 4, 6 & Micah 5:2 (NLT)

Week 35 Matthew

When I start reading a new book I figure there’ll be new stuff to learn.
A good example is in chapter two where King Herod calls in: all the chief priests and scribes of the people. Scribes? I check another version and instead of chief priests and scribes it says: the leading priests and teachers of religious law. So…scribes are teachers of religious law.
I check a word book and see this is the first time in the NT that scribes are mentioned (but they’re not a brand new species that suddenly emerged in Matthew – scribes are mentioned in Kings & Chronicles and in Ezra & Nehemiah. Ezra actually was a scribe).
So anyway that explains why Herod called them in – they were religious specialists. They were bible readers-and-studiers and they knew the answer to Herod’s question. I’ve still got the word book open on my lap and see that Matthew referred to scribes 21 times. I take four minutes to scan those verses. It looks to me like Matthew only says either value-neutral or else negative things about scribes (even a positive-sounding thing turns sour when the Lord says: the teachers of religious law…are the official interpreters of the Scriptures. So practice and obey whatever they say to you, but don’t follow their example).
Scribes were OT-readers, a professional society of religious & legal specialists & bible teachers. But they were still on the outside-looking-in.

Note: quotes from Matthew 2:4 (NASB & NLT) & 23:2-3 (NLT)

Week 35 Matthew

I know that generational lists are important in the OT. So I’m not surprised the NT starts with a generational list: this is a record of the ancestors of Jesus the Messiah, a descendant of King David and Abraham.
Matthew’s List of Kings includes David Solomon Rehoboam Abijah Asa Jehoshaphat Jehoram Uzziah Jotham Ahaz Hezekiah Manasseh Amos Josiah & Jehoiachin.
I go back to 2 Chronicles to check that list. It’s not as big a job as you’d think since Chronicles is only interested in the Southern Kingdom. What’s harder to figure out is why 2 Chronicles has three more kings than Matthew – between Matthew’s Jehoram and Uzziah the chronicler adds Ahaziah Joash & Amaziah.
There’s no real question about who’s correct. It’s definitely Chronicles. But there is a question about why Matthew missed those three names. It don’t figure it was because of ignorance – last year on August 21 I calculated that he quoted the OT 1.8 times per chapter. Matthew knew his OT.
And I don’t think he was being deceptive – why lie about a fact that could easily be checked by a ten year-old?
But why he missed/skipped the names I don’t know. In verse-17 it looks like he wanted three balanced & equal fourteen-generation groups. Maybe the literary equilibrium warranted the historical error. Maybe it was a first-century convention that reader’s accepted. I don’t know.
What I do know is that my reading challenges aren’t over.

Note: Quote from Matthew 1:1 (NLT)

Week 35 Matthew

In my bible there’s one unnumbered page between the end of the OT (page #1334) and the beginning of the NT (page #1).
I don’t have exact figures but I’m guessing quite a few people skip the first 1334 pages and start reading NT page #1 since the OT is old – which could mean a) old-fashioned b) irrelevant c) more-or-less useless and like that. So why bother?
On the one hand I tend to think there’s some OT content that’s not currently-applicable. On the other there’s OT material that seems pretty okay.
For example this winter I read Psalm 15. It’s a list of characteristics of people who are eligible to approach the Lord. They’re people who:
lead blameless lives
do what is right
speak the truth from sincere hearts
refuse to slander others
refuse to harm their neighbors
refuse to speak evil of their friends
despise persistent sinners
honor the faithful followers of the Lord
keep their promises even when it hurts
do not charge interest on the money they lend
do not accept bribes to testify against the innocent
I read through the list again today and it didn’t sound old-fashioned or irrelevant or more-or-less useless to me. They all seemed pretty okay.
Let’s say I had a multiple-choice question:
a) the OT & NT are totally different
b) the OT & NT have similarities-and-differences
c) the OT is no different from the NT…
I’d choose b).

Note: quotes from Psalm 15:2-5 (NLT)