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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)

Week 44  Acts 9

This year I was noticing the spectacular events in the church.
On the Day of Pentecost people were beside themselves with wonder. They were amazed and perplexed.
When the apostles performed miracles everyone was filled with awe.
The lame man walked and people were absolutely astounded…and in awe of the wonderful thing that had happened.
Ananias & Sapphira died on-the-spot and people were filled with great fear.
Stephen performed amazing miracles and signs.
In Samaria when Philip performed miracles there was great joy.
Aeneas was healed and the whole population…turned to the Lord.
Tabitha was raised from the dead.
I could easily form the impression that the NT church was a parade of spectacles. But there was quite a bit of low-key normalcy at the same time. I noticed when I read Tabitha’s story there’s only two things said about her life: she was always doing kind things for others and helping the poor (the example given was that she made clothing for widows in Lydda).
It’s one of the great short stories in Acts. All that Tabitha did was to help the poor and do kind things for people. It wasn’t very much…no inexplicable jaw-dropping actions by Tabitha. But there was standing-room only when she died.

Note: quotes from Acts 2:7 12 2:43 3:10-11 5:5 11 6:8 8:6 9:35 40 36 (NLT). End of month report: I’ve read 1587-pages out of 1730. So I’m staying ahead.

Week 43  Acts 9

Paul’s conversion story is told three times. In Acts 9 (by Luke) and then in  chapter 22 & 26 (by Paul).
A couple of years ago I noticed that the words that the Lord said to Paul were reported differently in each telling…mostly in length:
Account #1: the Lord said 30 words
Account #2: 38 words
Account #3: 127 words.
This year I noticed that the length of each account was also different:
Account #1: 16 verses (~360 words)
Account #2: 11 verses (~230 words)
Account #3: 7 verses (~190 words).
So obviously there’s differences:
The first account is told by Luke and is more detailed. Paul is telling his own story in #2 & #3.
A detail in one account might get skipped in another (for example Ananias isn’t even mentioned in Account #3).
Or a detail might be in one account only (for example Ananias tells Paul to get baptized only in #2).
But the differences are in the details. The stories are the same. It’s not like one account says Paul didn’t go blind…or that he put Ananias in prison…or that he heard the Lord tell him he was doing a great job.
It’s like if a kid keeps asking me to tell the story of the wolf and the pigs. I might switch-out some of the details each time I retell it but the wolf is always big and bad and the pigs – three of them – are always little.

Note: The Damascus road story is in Acts 9:3-18 22:6-16 & 26:12-18.

Week 43  Acts 4-5

Along with quite a few admirable developments in the NT church quite a bit of hostility from opponents also got mixed right in – verbal-threats physical-violence imprisonment and like that.
One pretty interesting adversarial development was when the religious leaders put a gag order on the apostles.
They told them: never to speak or teach again about Jesus. (Peter & John replied: do you think God wants us to obey you rather than him?)
Before long the council re-arrested them: didn’t we tell you never again to teach in this man’s name? (The apostles replied: we must obey God rather than human authority.)
Later the leaders: ordered them again never to speak in the name of Jesus . (But: the apostles left the high council…and continued to teach and preach.)
So the disciples flat-out contravened that particular by-law. It’s not like they weren’t law-abiding citizens (but they weren’t law-abiding to the point of being 100% compliant no-matter-what the state decreed).
The sticking point for the church was their idea of a Command Structure (CS).
God was at the top of the CS. What he decided was absolute & final. The state was part of the CS and so it could make rules too. But any rules that violated the Lord’s rules – just based on how the logic of the CS worked – were illegitimate.
One of the early church’s jobs was distinguishing legitimate rules (which they obeyed) from non-legitimate ones (which they legitimately disregarded).

Note: quotes from Acts 4:18-19 5:27 29 5:40-42 (NLT)

Week 43  Acts 6

I get the sense that in the early days the NT church categorized people in one of two ways:
There were people who believed in the Lord and were in the church.
There were people who didn’t believe in the Lord and were outside of the church.
A pretty basic divide. But things didn’t stay simple:
As the believers rapidly multiplied, there were rumblings of discontent. Those who spoke Greek complained against those who spoke Hebrew, saying that their widows were being discriminated against in the daily distribution of food.
So an in-church sub-division had already began:
There were people in the church who believed (and spoke Hebrew).
And people in the church who believed (and spoke Greek).
(Soon enough there’ll be:
Jewish people in the church who believed and spoke Hebrew.
Jewish people in the church who believed and spoke Greek.
And non-Jewish people in the church who believed and spoke Greek.
And there’d be more subdivisions: nationality ethnicity language country-of-origin gender occupation age wealth/income status class vocation marital-status health and like that.)
So anyway…what happened with the inequitable food distribution?
The leaders listened to the complaint…
They knew they needed to re-equalize the inequity…
So they gave highly qualified people the job of restoring equilibrium.
Back in chapter two it sounded like the church was uncommonly wonderful. By chapter six there were signs the wonderfulness was degrading so the church took action to restore what it had had.

Note: quote from Acts 6:1 (NLT)

Week 43  Acts 5

The Ananias & Sapphira story is alarming & provocative.
I usually think of it as a stand-alone episode but it’s really more a story of contrasts because it goes together with the story of Barnabas from chapter four.
There are similarities and differences between Barnabas and A&S.
Barnabas:
owned a tract of land…
sold it for cash…
gave it to the church.
A&S:
had a piece of property…
sold it for cash…
gave it to the church.
In the actual-visible-financial world of real estate transactions and charitable-giving Barnabas and A&S are exactly the same.
But in the world of what’s happening behind the actual-visible-financial world of real estate transactions and charitable-giving Barnabas and A&S are pretty dissimilar.
Peter revealed that A&S had:
colluded on a plan to deceive people…
lied to the apostles about how much money they kept…
lied to the Lord…
put the Spirit to the test.
(Peter doesn’t actually say it but it’s a safe guess that Barnabas didn’t deceive people or lie about his gift or put the Spirit to the test.)
I remember a couple of similar instant-reaction stories from the OT. In the totality of events I figure they’re rare. But their bolt-from-the-blue suddenness is electrocutive. They’re frightening & devastating & unexpected.
My guess is that people regularly lie deceive & put the Spirit to the test without any outcomes.
So A&S are tragic reminders.

Note: the story is in Acts 5:1-11

Week 43  Acts 2

Number-wise the church was growing fast in the early days and I wondered how leaders managed the sudden growth. It’s like having 100 subscribers on your channel and then next day you’ve got 10000.
But a more important question for me is: what-all’s going on in the church?
Luke started answering that question in chapter 2. 3000 new people came into the faith and they:
Got together with the other believers
Devoted themselves to learning what the church taught
Shared in communion & in regular community meals
Prayed together
Spent a lot of time together
Shared what they had
Sold what they owned and gave to needy people
Worshipped together & praised God
Luke described more than a dozen things but I highlighted these since they seemed pretty important.
While I’m reading the bible I have a kind of general concept floating around that I think of as The Applicability Question (AQ). (Probably lots of people figure the bible is totally inapplicable to real-life circumstances in the modern world. But I look for applicability.)
The AQ subdivides bible content into three main categories:
A) bible things that I think are inapplicable
B) borderline bible things I’m not sure about
C) bible things that are applicable in the contemporary world.
I think that several of the features that Luke points out about the church in the ancient world are heavyweight principles that cross time & geography & cultures so that now ought to be a modern version of then.

Note: paraphrased verses from Acts 2:42-47

Week 43  Acts 2

I was noticing the numerical data Luke gave on how quickly the church grew.
In chapter 1 he said there were 120 loyal followers of the Lord (there were likely more than that in total but that was the core group in Jerusalem).
Luke estimated that after the sudden arrival of the Holy Spirit 3000 people came into the church.
And before too long 5000 more came to belief.
After that I found some more church-growth data but it was qualitative:
More and more people believed and were brought to the Lord
The (number of) believers rapidly multiplied
The number of believers greatly increased in Jerusalem.
I sketched out a rough graph. I knew that my axes were a bit shaky – I estimated some values on both my x (time) and y (numbers) lines (in fact I flat-out cheated with some numbers – the three times where Luke didn’t give exact numerical data I added an arbitrary 1000 people). But I figure the basic trendline was pretty obvious & indisputable. It was all up…up…up for awhile – maybe weeks or months.
Of course then Saul of Tarsus arrived with his religiously-sanctioned oppression and so the believers bugged-out en masse (except the apostles). So my graph stepped off a cliff.
Anyway the exercise got me thinking about a related question: how did the leaders manage the sudden growth? And another question in the back of my mind was: what-all was going on in the church as it expanded?

Note: see Acts 1:15 2:41 4:4 5:14 6:1 6:7 8:1 (NLT)