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Week 51 Jude

Sometimes I use exercises to help me read through.
They’re kind of Alertness Promotion Tools to try to manage my mental driftage.
I don’t think there’s any single, perfect solution for when my mind wanders but even these half-baked exercises are sometimes okay.
So for example early this year I decided to track the character traits of God. When I found a verse that said something about God – for instance, the Lord is patient – then I’d record it. I found dozens of them; there’s likely dozens in psalms alone. It was a big exercise, took me all year, and likely too big if time is critical.
A simpler one for me was plotting everything the Lord said about money in the gospels.
Anyway I was reading Jude’s warning about church members who had a) denied the Lord Jesus, and b) said the Lord’s rules-for-living were now disregard-able. Jude compared these people to three OT guys: Cain, Balaam, and Korah.
It’s been ten months since I read Moses but I remember that Cain, Balaam, and Korah were on the OT Bad Guys List. So then that got me wondering if I should make that an Alertness Promotion exercise for 2021 – list all the bad guys in the OT.
But realistically I’m thinking I won’t likely do it. It’d be a big job, and pretty complicated, and I’m not sure it’d be much benefit to me.

Note: see Cain: Genesis 4, Balaam: Numbers 22, Korah: Numbers 16.

Week 51 Jude

I read Jude today.
I didn’t come away with the feeling that Jude was an indifferent or comme-ci-comme-ca kind of guy. Of course, the problem he was talking about was a biggish one.
He said he was writing: because some godless people have wormed their way in among you saying that God’s forgiveness allows you to live immoral lives.
If those people had come to the church and taught that God’s forgiveness allowed me to live a moral life then no problem.
Or if they had come to the church and taught that satanic deceptions could bamboozle me into living an immoral life then again, no problem.
But it was more like they said it’s okay to act in exactly the way that the Lord said it’s not okay to act.
So Jude wrote his seriously fearsome letter.
By contrast, at the end of the letter Jude says what believing people in the church should be aiming for: …continue to build your lives on the foundation of your holy faith. And continue to pray as you are directed by the Holy Spirit. Live in such a way that God’s love can bless you as you wait for the eternal life that our Lord Jesus Christ in his mercy is going to give you. Show mercy to those whose faith is wavering.
I read it a couple of times, and Jude doesn’t say anything to advocate immorality.

Note: quotes from Jude 4, 20-22 (NLT)

Week 51 a psalm

Since I figured I was in pretty good shape to finish reading through by the end of the year I read psalm 119 today.
My plan was to break it up into chunks but I ended up reading it all. It’s long.
It turned out to be a pretty helpful chapter for me since I’m thinking about my reading plan for 2021. Which means I’m deciding about whether to read the OT. I guess lots of people skip the OT for the standard reasons – it’s a tough slog, boring, irrelevant, indecipherable, like that. So 119 makes you rethink those reasons because mysterious-and-incomprehensible don’t seem to be the writer’s opinion of the OT at all.
For example: oh, how I love your law! I think about it all day long.
For example: at midnight I rise to thank you for your just laws.
As an exercise to keep my brain tracking I looked for things that the writer said the Law helped him with. I found more than forty. For example: as pressure and stress bear down on me, I find joy in your commands.
I wondered how this worked. An OT guy, maybe an iron-age guy, all those centuries ago, pre-NT, but he calls the OT Law: the music of my life.
If I’m totally confident the OT has zero value for me then no need to read it.
But 119 leaves me feeling not totally confident. Like there’s more to it than meets-the-eye.

Note: quotes from Psalm 119:97, 62, 143, 54 (NLT)

Week 50 2 Peter

I start reading Peter’s second letter with my usual goals: a) cover the ground, and b) absorb what I can. But by the fifth verse I’m doing neither. Peter says:
So make every effort to apply the benefits of these promises to your life
Then your faith will produce a life of moral excellence
A life of moral excellence leads to knowing God better
Knowing God leads to self-control
Self-control leads to patient endurance
And patient endurance leads to godliness
Godliness leads to love for other Christians
And finally you will grow to have genuine love for everyone.
The paragraph slows me down, stalls me.
These sixty-eight words are part of the answer to the question: what happens when I believe in the Lord? Simple enough question…not as simple an answer.
The way Peter writes the paragraph makes it seem like a ladder. There’s the first step, then the second, then third. Faith happens, then moral excellence starts up on a tangent to faith, a step-by-step evolvement. Or I guess it could be an untidier overlapping-type development. Or maybe everything moves ahead in a roughly simultaneous way.
But one way or the other life after belief is a compound made up of several elements – in this case there’s seven or eight of them. Interconnected things. Which is very, very useful to know. But knowing is only part of it.

Note: quote taken from 2 Peter 1:5-7 (NLT)

Week 50 James

A couple of years ago I read James in fifteen minutes. I don’t remember the circumstances. I was likely in hurry-up mode, trying to finish by December 31. Fifteen minutes – nine hundred seconds – doesn’t give you too much time on any one of James’ 108 verses. Only about 8.3 seconds per verse on average.
This year I’m ahead of myself so I’ve had three days to read James.
One thing I noticed was the contrast James made in chapter three between two kinds of wisdom. James described one kind of wisdom as being: earthly, unspiritual, and motivated by the Devil. The other kind of wisdom is a kind that: comes down from heaven.
So the question about where I’m sourcing my wisdom is pretty important.
Then James goes on to point out that different wisdoms from different sources also produce different outcomes. Three times in verses fourteen, fifteen and sixteen James says that the this-worldly type of wisdom is jealous and selfishly ambitious. By contrast the wisdom that comes from above: is first of all pure. It is also peace-loving, gentle at all times, and willing to yield to others. It is full of mercy and good deeds. It shows no partiality and is always sincere.
So according to James wisdom isn’t just a free-floating mental capacity, a big bag of intellectual smartnesses. It’s quite a bit more comprehensive than what I know. It includes who I am.

Note: quotes from James 3:15 & 17-18 (NLT).

Week 50 Hebrews

I think Hebrews 11 is a good argument for reading the OT because it names a bunch of OT people. If I haven’t read the OT at all then reading Hebrews 11 is a bit like reading, for example, Ezra chapter two. It’s just another long list of unknown names.
But if I have read the OT then I’m thinking, yeah, I recognize him, or, I remember her story.
Of course chapter eleven isn’t really meant to be an OT Highlight Reel. It misses too many important people. It’s really a selective list of OT people who exercised faith.
Which is pretty interesting because when I think about the OT there are obvious big-ticket practices like civil regulations, sacrifices, religious ceremonies and like that. But the writer of Hebrews is saying that faith was part of that OT mix too. I notice that it’s thirty-one verses before the writer even gets to Mount Sinai and the Law. Which means that in all the time before-the-Law some people had faith. And even in the after-the-Law time of verses 32-39 people were still acting by faith. In fact they all: gained approval through their faith.
So I’ve got to be careful to not breakdown the bible like this: the OT = law, and the NT = faith. According to chapter eleven there was faith all the way back to Abel. So it’s more like this: the OT = faith, and the NT = faith. Faith in all of it.

Note: quote from Hebrews 11:39 (NASB)

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.