Month: October 2023

Week 41  John 1

John starts by talking about the mysterious and unidentified The Word.
He says that The Word created everything there is. It’s hard not to think back to Genesis where God created everything. John says here that The Word created everything.
John also says that life itself was in him. When I first read this I think it works like this: Life is in The Word and The Word then transfers the Life to non-living things. So in Genesis there aren’t any living things at first but then all kinds of living things get created and come alive (hummingbirds & giraffes & people). But if that’s what John meant then he likely would have said: “Life itself was in him, and this Life gives Life to everyone”. Which he didn’t. He said: life itself was in him, and this life gives light to everyone. Light is part of the mix.
It’s always possible that Life and Light are two words for the same thing. But it sounds to me more like all Live Things universally got their life from The Word. And then there’s a supplementary thing that The Word had – Light – which could be an add-on to the Life that Live Things already had.
My sense is that all Live Things had Life. But the Live Things didn’t necessarily have Light. They could be Alive. But still be operating in the Dark.

Note: quotes from John 1:3 4 (NLT)

Week 41  Luke 20

The Sadducees said to the Lord: let’s say a woman married a guy. The guy died so she married his brother. He died so she married a third brother…And on & on through seven marriages to seven brothers. Then she died.  Question: in the afterlife which guy would be her husband? (So it was a seven-option multiple-choice question.)
Because it was likely a dumb hypothetical question the Lord didn’t answer it but he did say a couple of interesting things about death & the post-mortem world:
Marriage is restricted to people in the material world (in the post-mortem world no one gets married)
In the post-mortem world people don’t die
Since people are immune from death they are similar to angels
It’s a brand new kind of life in the post-mortem world.
This is a pretty interesting anecdote. Not because of the crazy question that the Sadducees had cooked up – they didn’t think about or care about or even believe in life-after-death. The interesting thing is that the Lord did say life continued beyond death in a more-than-material state where people a) would live forever and b) wouldn’t get married and c) would live a new kind of life.
It doesn’t say what other things people would or wouldn’t do after death.
Doesn’t say how people were not like angels.
Doesn’t say what was actually new & different about the next world.
But what the Lord did say is worth knowing about.

Note: the story is in Luke 20:27-40

Week 41  Luke 20

The Lord told a story about a wealthy land owner who rented out his land to some small farmers and the agreement was that they would work the land for themselves and pay the landowner some rent. But when the landowner’s son came to collect rents the farmers murdered him.
Jesus’ audience was offended by the story: God forbid that such a thing should ever happen. But then Jesus asked them: then what do the Scriptures mean? “The stone rejected by the builders has now become the cornerstone”. No one answered the question. I guess nobody knew.
The verse was from the psalms. I flipped back and read: the stone rejected by the builders has now become the cornerstone. I re-read the whole psalm. Then I asked myself: what does that verse mean? And I didn’t know the answer either.
If all I’ve ever read is the OT then I think it’ll be hard to know what to make of that verse. But once I’ve read Luke it changes things. Now it looks like the Rejected Stone = the murdered son (who looks like Jesus himself). And the Builders Who Rejected the Stone = the Pharisees (even they knew that was the spin being put on the story).
Whatever the writer of Psalm 118 might have originally meant the Lord says it also referred to him. He was the discarded stone. He would turn out to be the foundational piece of the whole building.

Note: quotes from Luke 20:16 17 & Psalm 118:22 (NLT)