Month: November 2022

Week 46  2 Corinthians

Paul compares coming to faith as something like this. It’s like having a cheap container…and then getting something really valuable and storing it in the container. Like me getting the Kohinoor diamond and I put it in a cheap little cardboard box.
The box eventually gets beat-up damaged kicked-around scuffed stepped-on. And whatever I do – glue it or duct tape it or reinforce it or repair it – my little cardboard box only lasts so long. Then it’s done.
But the diamond lasts.
Paul said: though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. The cardboard box is deteriorating. The diamond is getting rejuvenated. Disintegration is happening but there’s also a kind of coordinated magical evolution.
The idea of there being a downside and an upside isn’t so hard to accept. Part of me’s getting beat-up and demolished and eventually destroyed. But another part of me is durable & lasting & developing & expanding.
Paul also points out an interesting & unexpected thing about the downside: through suffering, these bodies of ours constantly share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies. Which seems to be saying that there’s the potential for there being an upside to the downside.
Downsides can be ruinous or degrading or demoralizing or crippling or painful. I might have a downside that’s all-of-the-above. But luckily not just.

Note: quotes from 2 Corinthians 4:16 10 (NLT)

Week 44  Romans 14 15

I don’t know how many different types of ranking systems there were in the NT church but Paul talks about one of them in Romans. It’s a Relative Strength Appraisal Scheme. I doubt that it was an officially mandated assessment tool but even so church people would have had an individual sense of being along a line ranging from very-high-strength to great-weakness. The ticklish thing about it was that it measured spiritual strength – the strength of personal faith.
Anyway I noticed two pieces of advice Paul gave to strong people:
First: accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters
Second: we who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves.
I broke the two into four phrases.
a) Accept a person with weak faith
b) Don’t slam the weaker guy’s opinions
c) Be patient with his blunders
d) Don’t please yourself
The natural tendencies of a guy who’s already pretty strong in his faith might be to:
a) Reject a person with weak faith
b) Judge a weak person’s opinions in a critical way
c) Not tolerate a weak person’s failures
d) Please himself
Outside the church it might be fair-game and standard practice to pan a weak person or trivialize his opinions or lose patience with his gaffs & repeated stupidities. Better to just indulge yourself.
But inside the church things are supposed to be a lot different.

Note: quotes from Romans 14:1 15:1 (NIV)

Week 44  Romans 6

I’m not sure why Paul asked the question but there it is: shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? I sit thinking about it. It’s an odd one.
I have my doubts that it’s theoretical…I don’t think it’s a random question Paul just happened to ask out-of-the-blue. I sounds to me like some people in the church had developed a Sin Management Theory that Paul thought was cock-eyed.
I tried to kind of reverse-engineer what Paul said about this skewed theory and it looked like this:
A) The world was a system that contained Amount-X of grace
B) In a steady-state system the quantity of grace would remain Amount-X
C) But if Amount-Y of sin was introduced into the system grace would react to that input and compensate for the imbalance
D) So then grace’s value would jump to (let’s say) Amount-X+Y .
At the practical & personal level the theory said:
Grace is good…
I can boost the amount of grace by sinning…
And since more grace is better then I should sin.
I’m not absolutely sure this is a completely accurate picture of the Sin Management Theory that Paul was talking about. Besides…I think the underlying question he was getting at was: what-do-I-do-about-sin?
In Rome some people figured you could manage sin by balancing it within the system. But Paul’s view was that it was best to just get it out of the system – Management by Extraction.

Note: quote from Romans 6:1 (NIV)