Medicine Hat Joe

Week 50  Hebrews 9

If someone asked: “where can I find a synopsis of the last sixteen chapters of Exodus?” then Hebrews 9 would be a good answer:
That first covenant between God and Israel had regulations for worship and a place of worship:
There were two rooms in that Tabernacle. In the first room were a lampstand, a table, and sacred loaves of bread on the table. This room was called the Holy Place.
Then there was a curtain, and behind the curtain was the second room called the Most Holy Place. In that room were a gold incense altar and a wooden chest called the Ark of the Covenant, which was covered with gold on all sides.
Inside the Ark were a gold jar containing manna, Aaron’s staff that sprouted leaves, and the stone tablets of the covenant.
Above the Ark were the cherubim of divine glory, whose wings stretched out over the Ark’s cover, the place of atonement.
When Moses had completed that big project it was the ultimate & most radical & most solidly-conclusive material way that the Lord could demonstrate: I’m here with you.
So that’s what makes Hebrews’ next comment a surprise:
that old system deals only with food and drink and various ceremonies — physical regulations that were in effect only until a better system could be established.
It was pretty elaborate & comprehensive & adequate then. Now? “Not so much” says the writer of Hebrews.

Note: quotes from Hebrews 9:1-5 10 (slightly paraphrased and reformatted) (NLT)

Week 50  Hebrews 1

A guy sits down to read the gospel stories of Jesus and he’ll most likely figure the Lord was a pretty great guy. Even if he didn’t think the gospel stories were true the chances are he’d be impressed by the Jesus of the gospels.
Jesus in the gospels did so many unlikely things (walking on water & healing sick people) and was so personally attractive (he had huge crowds of admirers) that it’s hard to read the gospels without thinking: what an unbelievable & extraordinary person!
But it looks like the writer of Hebrews wasn’t sure the gospels had made it absolutely crystal clear how great Jesus was. So he started right in by listing unusual things about Jesus not highlighted in the gospels (well…maybe  with the exception of John). He said that:
God promised everything to the Son as an inheritance
Through the Son he made the universe
The Son reflects God’s glory
The Son represents God exactly
The Son sustains the universe by his command
The Son sat down at the right hand of God
It’s almost like Hebrews figured a person might not get an accurate top-to-bottom impression of Jesus from reading just the gospels.
It’s almost like Hebrew’s writer thought Jesus needed to be put in an elevator:
“In the gospels you get to see him on the lower floors…fair enough.
But now I want to make sure you see him in the executive suite.”

Note: quotes from Hebrews 1:2-3 (NLT)

Week 50  Ephesians

My question for the last week has been: is Ephesians a Unified Letter?
I felt pretty confident that chapters 1-3 were unified around the idea that a) God had a long-term plan that was focused almost exclusively on Jewish people but that b) the plan then had been expanded to include non-Jewish people. Ephesians 1-2-3 was mostly about the Union of Jewish & Non-Jewish people.
So then on to chapters 4 & 5. There were 52-verses  that described how I should be living my life once I believe in the Lord. I detected Cohesion in that section too:
First, Paul said explicit things about the connection of Jewish & non-Jewish people:
always keep yourselves united in the Spirit
bind yourselves together with peace
we are all one body
unity in our faith and knowledge
the whole body is fitted together perfectly
the whole body is healthy and growing.
Then secondly Paul mapped out action-steps that sounded (to me) like they were union-promoters. Here’s what I mean: in the 52-verse section I counted up all the action-steps. I found 47 things Paul was telling people in Ephesus to do.  I think his logic is that if the Ephesian believers were following the Lord by doing these 47 Coordinated Action Steps then – nine times out of ten – the result would be ethnic connection in church.
I think I can make a case for Paul writing a Unified Letter from Ephesians 1:1 – 5:20. But unfortunately that’s about as far as I can go before things break down.

Note: quotes from Ephesians 4:3 4 13 16 (NLT)

Week 49  Ephesians 4-6

Since finishing both halves of Ephesians – chapters 1-3 and 4-6 – I’ve been testing whether there was any way that the two cohered. Whether they could be seen as a unified & whole piece of writing.
My quick reflex answer is “no”. To me the opening chapters consistently looked like a lot of Religious Theoreticals. But the last half of the letter were more rubber-meets-the-road Religious Rules & Advice. The first half demanded a lot of mental focus and thinking power. The second not so much. The second  was simpler. More straight-ahead. More understandable. And mostly doing-things.
On the surface they look different. Like one side of a two-sided coin. I think one argument for calling Ephesians unified & coherent is because there’s lots of things that are just like that. They look one way on one side but different on the other. For instance gaming is fun and entertaining and absorbing and straightforward. But someone (a smart someone) did a lot of hard work writing the program.
Another thing I need to remember is that Paul seemed to do this kind of thing a lot. I did a quick scan of Paul’s letters and I saw that he was constantly mixing theory-practice. Reading Paul’s letters I’m pretty much guaranteed to get what I think he figured was a fusion of related content: intricate thought-provokers alongside of clear-as-day actionables.
So Paul’s Ephesian letter maybe isn’t exactly unified. On the other hand I wonder if maybe in one way it is.

Week 49  Ephesians 4-6

I have two conclusions about Ephesians 1-3.
Conclusion #1 is that Paul did have one Big Idea in these chapters (it was that Non-Jewish People would not be Outsiders any more).
Conclusion #2 is that I think Paul stayed pretty much on topic for those three chapters.
But things are looking quite a bit different in chapters 4-5-6. I would title Ephesians 4-6: Advice About How I Should Live My Life.
The first half of that section (51 verses) lists Things to Do & Things to Avoid and each of those things are subdivided into either Specific Directives or General Principles.
By Specific Directives I mean things like this:
be patient with each other
stop stealing
get rid of all anger, harsh words, and slander.
I found about 30 of those explicit rules.
General Principles aren’t so definite:
lead a life worthy of your calling
follow God’s example in everything you do
be careful how you live.
There are eight or ten of those guidelines.
(Then there’s another whole 22-verse section about how relationships in a social hierarchy are supposed to work. Lots of people think hierarchies are dinosaurian but my bigger concern is: where is Paul going with this? Does it relate?)
The long-and-short is that things are breaking-up on me now. My Prime Directive was to see a) if Paul had One Big Idea and b) if he stuck with it. Right now it looks likes the answers are: a) likely and b) doubtful.

Note: quotes from Ephesians 4:2 28 31 & 4:1 5:1 15 (NLT)

Week 49  Ephesians 1-3

Thinking back a couple of days I remember that my Ephesians Task had two parts. Part One: see if Paul wrote about one single idea. Part Two: see if he could stay on-track and avoid tangents.
So far it’s looking to me like Ephesians 1-3 concentrates on the Lord’s Plan – to invite all non-Jewish people into the family of God. So now I’m taking time for a quick re-read to see whether Paul stayed on-track.
I think that Paul does more-or-less stick with the topic of The Plan. But I see two exceptions. The first one is the last paragraph of chapter one where Paul inserts a prayer for the Ephesians. The second one is another prayer that ends chapter three.
To me these seem like definite getting-off-topic sections. Paul is not talking about The Plan. But there’s two things I think about this.
First I have to admit that Paul Did Not Stay On Topic in these two passages. No two-ways-about-it.
But the second thing is this. When I was looking for Paul to go off-script I was thinking about him discussing the topic of – let’s say – elephants…but then suddenly turning a corner and talking about chihuahuas. But I think that’s a bit different than inserting these two prayers into the letter.
So for now I’m cutting Paul some slack. Did he go off-topic? Yes. But not totally. It’s more like he was adding a footnote and not starting a brand new chapter.

Note: prayer #1 Ephesians 1:15-23 & #2 3:14-21

Week 49  Ephesians 2-3

I made a mistake a couple of days ago when I thought I’d nailed down Paul’s Big Idea in Ephesians: that the Lord had a Plan.
It’s not that the Lord did Not have a Plan. He definitely had a plan. My mistake was thinking that since I knew there was a Plan that that’s all I needed to know. Now as I keep reading I’m seeing that Paul intention is to spell out the content of The Plan.
He plainly says: and this is the secret plan: The Gentiles have an equal share with the Jews. Which is pretty novel. The OT story is that there’s a select group of people (Jewish people) – Insiders. Everyone else is an Outsider.
Now Paul is explaining how The Plan has taken a turn. He tells his Ephesian-Gentile audience about a Before & After.
Before you were:
outsiders by birth
living apart
excluded
without God
But now:
you belong…
There’s peace between us
We’re all one people
There’s no more wall of hostility
the whole system of exclusion is over
The Plan was to make peace between Jewish & non-Jewish people
Now we’re all reconciled to God
All of us…may come to the Father
Gentiles are no longer strangers and foreigners
They’re citizens
They’re members of God’s family.
The OT was a story of separation.
The NT – the Secret Plan Revealed – is about incorporation.

Note: quotes from Ephesians 3:6 & 2:11 12a 12b 15 12c 13 14a 14b 15a 15b 16a 18 19a 19b 19c 20 (NLT)

Week 49  Ephesians 2

In chapter 2 Paul gives a short description of what things were like in The State of Things Before Christ: once you were dead because of your disobedience and your many sins. You used to live in sin, just like the rest of the world, obeying the devil — the commander of the powers in the unseen world. He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to obey God. All of us used to live that way, following the passionate desires and inclinations of our sinful nature. By our very nature we were subject to God’s anger, just like everyone else.
I spent about eight months this year reading the 39 Books of the OT – all of them written during The State of Things Before Christ – written in what Paul would call the once-you-were-dead time. A long time of waiting. Biding time. Sitting-tight until Christ arrived.
It’s not like the centuries were a complete waste of time. There was the Abraham family. Egypt & the Exodus. The Promised Land. The Judges and then the Kings. The Collapse of Kingdoms. Exile and Return from Exile. A lot of things going on. Quite a few people finding the Lord even in that preliminary & prototypical & preparatory & cooling-their-heels test-case scenario that was The State of Things Before Christ. A long time of disconnect when things were flying apart.
But Christ came and things started to slowly be reconstructed.

Note: quote from Ephesians 2:1-3 (NLT)

Week 49  Ephesians 1

My goal in re-reading Ephesians was to see if Paul had one single idea (an Ephesians Focal-Point). Something he talked about through the whole letter. (I also wanted to see if he could talk about that thing without wandering too far off-track.)
Yesterday it looked to me like Paul’s Big Idea was The Lord’s Plan. I felt okay with it and left it at that. But today I’m seeing that The Plan has a lot of moving parts. For instance one element of The Plan was that at some future time the Lord would: bring everything together under the authority of Christ.
I wonder for a bit about what that meant. For one thing I think it’s saying that Before Christ everything was Not Together. That things in-heaven-&-earth were Not Unified. That things were in a state of dividedness or fragmentation or differentiation or friction. That things weren’t consolidated or homogeneous. That the world was a busted-to-pieces Humpty Dumpty place from Genesis to Malachi. Israel. Egypt. Asia. The states of Africa & India & the East. The Americas. All of them in a state of Fracturization.
It’s like there’s two temporal episodes: a) The State of Things Before Christ and b) the State of Things After Christ. In The State of Things Before Christ everything was disconnected. And in the State of Things After Christ? God has put all things under the authority of Christ. A reconsolidation.

Note: quotes from Ephesians 1:10 22 (NLT)

Week 49  Ephesians 1

I’m looking to find Paul’s Central Idea in Ephesians. My basic rule-of-thumb was: if Paul keeps repeating the same idea then that’s probably his Central Idea.
So I’m not too far into the first chapter before I start to see Paul focusing on what he calls the plan. He referred to it half a dozen times (sometimes calling it ‘the plan’ and other times the Lord’s decision or purpose or promise). The Plan seemed to fall off the table in chapter two (boo). But then Paul started talking about it again (maybe another half-dozen times) in chapter three (yay).
The Plan was a long-term purpose that the Lord had. For a lonnnng-time The Plan wasn’t obvious. But – says Paul – God’s secret plan has now been revealed to us; it is a plan centered on Christ, designed long ago…This is his plan: at the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ. Paul expanded on it a bit later: and this is the secret plan: the Gentiles have an equal share with the Jews in all the riches inherited by God’s children…Both are part of the same body.
I’m starting to think that The Plan might be my key to Ephesians 1-3. So now I have to a) confirm that The Plan is Paul’s Central Idea. And b) I have to see if Paul sticks with his Central Idea from start-to-finish.

Note: quotes from Ephesians 1:9-10 & 3:6-7 (NLT)