Medicine Hat Joe

Week 1  Genesis 1

Was anything going on before Genesis 1:1?
Here’s list of a few things I found last year:
Lord…before you gave birth to the world…you are God
Your throne, O Lord, has stood from time immemorial. You yourself are from the everlasting past
Jesus’ prayer: Father, bring me into the glory we shared before the world began
Jesus’ prayer: Father…you loved me even before the world began
Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ
God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see – such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world
God’s plan: from before the beginning of time was to show us his grace through Christ Jesus.
This truth gives (believers) confidence that they have eternal life, which God promised them before the world began
God chose (Christ) as your ransom long before the world began
The Lamb who was killed before the world was made.
Verses like these are a good reminder that Genesis accounts for the beginning of the material world. But it doesn’t account for very much about Pre-Material happenings – about events that were going on before our space and before our time.

Note: quotes from Psalm 90:1-2 Psalm 93:2 John 17:5 John 17:24 Ephesians 1:4 Colossians 1:16-17 2 Timothy 1:9 Titus 1:2 1 Peter 1:20 Revelation 13:8 (NLT). Credit & thx to (I think) Francis Schaeffer for some of these refs.

Week 1  Genesis 1

The bible’s story begins: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was empty, a formless mass cloaked in darkness. And the Spirit of God was hovering over its surface.
The footnote says the opener could read: in the beginning when God created… Or even: when God began to create…
But the alternate readings don’t make much of a difference. The main thing for me today is how the New Earth is described:
Empty
An unformed mass
Dark.
In the beginning the earth had no contents. No structure. No light.
I try to picture it. I don’t think of it like the dark side of the moon – a barren – but solid – surface. I visualize it more like the middle of the Pacific Ocean at night during a storm. Mostly water. Something…but almost nothing. A shapeless unstructured dark mass with nothing in or on it.
If someone described hell this way I guess I could believe it. It’s an eerie & terrible-sounding place. But it was physical & material. It was something at least. Not nothing.
One thing I wonder about this empty unstructured dark place is how long it stayed that way. A week? A thousand years? Five billion years?
I don’t really need to know the answer. But I’m curious. So I’m only two-verses into my bible-reading year and I get Example #1 of an unexplained curiosity.  Plus I’m reminded that not all my curiosities are likely going to get explained.

Note: quote from Genesis 1:1-2 (NLT)

Week 1  Psalm 1

The last verse of the psalm says: the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish.
It sounds pretty straightforward but I figure I could make it a bit simpler for myself. For instance:
“The way of righteous people leads to life
The way of evil people leads to death”
That seems like a clearer way to write up the basic principle. It’s nicely balanced. And it’s still a legitimate bible idea. But that’s not how David wrote it. He complicated – and unbalanced – it a bit by including the idea of the Watching-Lord:
The Lord watches over the way of the righteous
But the way of the wicked will perish.
I could link-up David’s ideas with mine:
The Lord watches over the way of the righteous
The way of righteous people leads to life
The Lord also watches over the way of wicked people
The way of the wicked will perish.
But whatever modifying I could do with it I’m still getting reminded that the psalms are both nice & simple and not so nice & simple.
I’m glad about their nice simplicities but don’t want to be fooled into thinking that’s all there are.
I think of the psalms as a primer…but they’re a primer for Living Like a Sage.
The psalms are both what they are on the surface and also a little more than that in the sub-surface.

Note: quote from Psalm 1:6 (NIV)

Week 52  Revelation

This morning I was thinking about churches. Seven specific churches. Ephesus Smyrna Pergamum Thyatira Sardis Philadelphia & Laodicea.
I thought about ranking them: Best-to-Worst. In the end I figured it was a waste of time. I already knew who’d land at the top and bottom ends. Smyrna & Philadelphia would be #1A & #1B (I’d probably flip a coin to decide). Laodicea would be #7. The other four would be harder to put a number to.
I thought of other NT congregations. Rome. Corinth. The Galatian group. Philippi. Colossae. Thessalonica. Each one of them a bit different from all the others but lots of them in that middle-range mix of some strengths along with some weaknesses. Some of them heading generally up. Some tilting down. Some idling in neutral.
Anyway my tendency is to think that operating independently (being personally free of the church) has its merits. One big problem is that by the time I get to the book of Acts I know the standard practice is for independent believers to band together into something like Incorporated Believers Guilds. So overall it seems that forming a union is most common. For me it’s also preferable to going it alone.
I’m not much of a New Year’s Resolution guy. But it crosses my mind that a) being a better church-team player would be a good 2024 aim for me. And that b) my church Gold Standard should be something along the lines of the Smyrna-Philadelphia Model.

Note: I’m finished Revelation. Tomorrow: Genesis 1.

Week 52  Case 7 Laodicea

One of the things I’ve noticed about the six previous churches is that John either a) says some Good Things & some Bad Things about each church or else b) he just says some Good Things. But he’s got nothing Good to say about Laodicea.
As far as that goes he doesn’t have a list of Bad Things about Laodicea either. It’s like he has nothing much to say about them one way or the other. They aren’t hot. They aren’t cold. They’re the lukewarm church in the list – The Indifferent & Neutral & Nonpartisan Church of Laodicea.
It’s pretty clear the people in the Laodicean church didn’t view themselves that way. They’d done some kind of a self-assessment and discovered three very self-affirming things (a kind of Laodicean Creed):
I am rich
I have everything I want
I don’t need a thing.
This didn’t square with the church-assessment that the Lord had done. According to his findings the Laodicean congregation was: wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked.
At least Ephesus Pergamum Thyatira & Sardis each had a couple of strengths – virtues to (arguably) balance out the shortfalls. But Laodicea had nothing. It was a nonchalant & unconcerned & easy-going Devil-may-care congregation.
The Lord ended by telling them to be diligent and turn from your indifference. But it’s hard to know how they’d manage a back-to-front 180-degree swing that would take them from I’m-Definitely-Okay to I’m-Not-Okay-At-All.

Note: Revelation 3:14-22. Quotes from 3:17 19 (NLT)

Week 52  Case 6 Philadelphia

The Lord says a couple of specific things about Philadelphia:
You have little strength
You obeyed my word
You didn’t deny me
You obeyed my command to persevere.
Obedience. Loyalty. Perseverance. Maybe on the surface not that impressive a list. But there’s no doubt Philadelphia had something going for it since the Lord told them: you are the ones I love.
The Lord also gave them one bit of advice: hold on to what you have, so that no one will take away your crown (I remembered Thyatira: I will ask nothing more of you except that you hold tightly to what you have).
I get the impression that Philadelphia was similar to Smyrna. John doesn’t say that Philadelphia was an impoverished and persecuted church like Smyrna. But he does say it wasn’t strong.
The other similarity was that Philadelphia & Smyrna were the only two churches on the list that John had nothing critical to say about. No fatal flaws.

Note: Revelation 3:7-13. Quotes from 3:8 10 9 11 2:24-25 (NLT)

Week 52  Case 5 Sardis

The church in Sardis had a reputation for being alive. A name in the community for being a vibrant lively animated vigorous place.
Unfortunately their public reputation was just a house-of-cards. The Lord’s view was quite a bit different: you are dead.
I think the Lord was exaggerating slightly here. He didn’t mean absolutely and totally dead since he added a follow-up faint-hope clause : now wake up! Strengthen what little remains, for even what is left is at the point of death. Luckily Sardis wasn’t a fully-and-clinically-dead church. But it was on life-support.
Likely the only thing standing between near-death and total death was that a few individuals in the church had stayed loyal to the Lord. A worthy minority.
But to the rest of the congregation the Lord said:
Go back to what you heard and believed at first
Hold to it firmly
Turn to me again.
I guess it’s a natural thing for churches to want to move forward. Improve. Advance. Evolve. Contemporize. Sardis seemed to have successfully moved along in that direction.
John’s warning was that in the process they had lost track of the fundamental things. And losing the fundamental things – even if they gained a great reputation in the community – was a poor trade-off.

Note: Revelation 3:1-6. Quotes from 3:1 2 3 2:24-25 (NLT). The Lord gave a similar bit of advice to Thyatira: I will ask nothing more of you except that you hold tightly to what you have.

Week 52  Case 4 Thyatira

John spotted four qualities in the church in Thyatira: your love, your faith, your service, and your patient endurance (and he commended their constant improvement in all these things).
So with that said John added: but I have this complaint against you…
John’s complaint was aimed at a specific individual in the church – a charismatic woman who exerted a powerful prophetic-like influence in the congregation. She called her teaching “deeper truths” and what they permitted people in the church to do was:
A) Worship idols
B) Eat food offered to idols
C) Commit sexual sin
Thyatira – like Pergamum – tried Mixing Unmixables. For instance blending faith & adultery. Or combining love for God with idol worship.
There’s a couple of things I notice here:
First is that these two churches apparently tried to maintain this delicate equilibrium (“let’s try keeping the Goods & Bads in dynamic balance”).
Second thing is that the Lord apparently kept putting up with churches that were mixing these toxic cocktails.
The situation couldn’t last forever. Eventually: all the churches will know that I (the Lord) am the one who searches out the thoughts and intentions of every person. And I will give to each of you what you deserve.
It’s pretty clear that the chickens would eventually come home to roost. But not quite yet. For now the churches get the benefit of the Lord’s long patience.

Note: Revelation 2:18-29. Quotes from 2:19 20 23 (NLT)

Week 52  Case 3 Pergamum

A key issue in the Pergamum church was that there were unsavory members in attendance. John didn’t name personal names but he did identify two groups of people: 1) ones who were like Balaam and 2) ones who were Nicolaitans. The groups were likely different. But both promoted similar teachings:
A) Idol worship was okay
B)Prohibited sexual activities weren’t prohibited any more.
Some of the church people in Pergamum had gone along with these less-restrictive & more-progressive new teachings.
Exactly how this played out in real church life is hard to know. John had already admitted that Pergamum was the place where the great throne of Satan is located but that in spite of their (terrible) location you have remained loyal to (the Lord). So…some members were definitely loyal followers of the Lord. But some had cozied-up to Balaam and/or the Nicolaitans.
So it sounds like two things are going on at the same time. Some being true to the Lord AND some practicing idolatry & taboo sex. Goods and Bads running along parallel tracks right down the centre aisle of the church.
But one of the things that’s clear in the NT: that’s isn’t how the church can run. Loyalty can’t be tracking in lockstep with disloyalty and so John’s advice is pretty short and pretty clear: Repent.
Pergamum wouldn’t last forever with their dual-track congregation. Something had to change or it would eventually quit being a church.

Note: Revelation 2:12-17. Quotes from 2:13 16 17 (NLT)

Week 52  Case 2 Smyrna

More than any other things Smyrna was a) an impoverished church and b) a suffering church (I know about your suffering and your poverty).
Their opponents were Jewish people (real live human opponents). But John said that the Jewish place of worship was a synagogue of Satan. And he went on to say that the Devil will throw some of you into prison. So I get the impression that both ethnic Jews & Satan himself were colluding against the believers in Smyrna.
John told them that they would:
Be slandered by their opponents
Be thrown into prison
Be put to the test
Be persecuted for some period of time.
I didn’t find anything about these people getting rescued. Nothing about the Lord miraculously swooping in and saving them from danger (like in some stories in the OT).
John just told them
Don’t be afraid of what you are about to suffer
Remain faithful even when facing death.
Other than that about all he said was that he was well-aware of what was going on. Told them to stick with it. Told them the Lord’s future promise: I will give you a crown of life.
I don’t know how many Smyrna-type churches there are around the world today. Likely none in Alberta. Likely quite a few in other countries. No resources. Under-the-guns of their adversaries. Hanging on by their fingertips. Holding onto nothing much more that a promise of a Crown of Life.

Note: Revelation 2:8-11. Quotes from 2:9 10 (NLT)