Medicine Hat Joe

Week 41  John 1

John started his gospel talking about the mysterious The Word. He said that life itself was in him. He also said that this life gives light to everyone. So The Word was the Possessor of Original Life (which in itself is pretty important) but in the next couple of verses John seems more interested in The Life being The Light.
The reason that John is making that point now is that The Word (The Life / The Light): the one who is the true light, who gives light to everyone, was going to come into the world. Up to now he’d been outside the world. But now he was going to arrive.
I’m thinking so-far-so-good but John wasn’t thinking so-far-so-good because he said: but although the world was made through him, the world didn’t recognize him when he came. Even in his own land and among his own people, he was not accepted. John didn’t exactly mean that not a single person in the whole world accepted The Light because he said that: to all who believed him and accepted him, he gave the right to become children of God. But it looks like believing in The Word and accepting The Word was going to be a minority opinion. Some did believe. But most didn’t. Which seems strange. If someone told me I could get transformed into a Child of God I think I’d jump at the chance. But lots of people obviously didn’t.

Note: quotes from John 1:4 9 10-11 12 (NLT)

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)

Week 38  Luke 1-2

Compared to Mark (who seemed to be in a huge rush to talk about the Lord’s adult life) and compared to Matthew (who told a couple of fairly short background stories about the Lord’s early life before moving on) Luke spent quite a bit of time talking about what was happening long before the Lord began his public career.
Mark wrote one verse of introduction then he was off-to-the-races with John the Baptist. He was pretty clearly interested in Adult Jesus.
Matthew took about 48-verses before he launched into John the Baptist & Jesus as adults (he squeezed in the popular Christmas story about the wise men. And then about how Joseph Mary & Jesus shifted locations while they were on-the-run).
Luke seemed to have a different priority. He wasn’t in such a hurry. He filled-in a lot of gaps. Without Luke a bible-reader is missing some pretty useful information:
The story of Zacharias & the angel
The Annunciation of Mary
Mary’s Magnificat
The birth & celebration of John the Baptist
Zacharias’ prophecy
The birth of Jesus
The angels & the shepherds-in-the-fields
Simeon’s prophecy
Anna’s prophecy
Jesus in the temple as a 12 year-old boy.
Each one of the sketches (except maybe the 6th) says something unusual or unexpected. Angels appear to people. Miracles happen. Prophetic prayers are prayed. Prophecies come true. Things happen out-of-the-blue.
It takes 152-verses before Luke starts in on the adult stories of John the Baptist and the Lord. But to me it’s worth the wait.

Week 38  Matthew 27

Matthew took a couple of  paragraphs to explain to readers what happened to Judas.
See that after he betrayed Jesus Judas was filled with remorse. Regret. Sorrow. Judas was terribly abjectly sorry. On a Sorrow Scale Judas would be near the very top.
See the attitude of the religious leaders when Judas went to them confessing his sin. What they told him was: what do we care? That’s your problem.
See that Judas threw the blood-money on the floor. It was important to him before. But it was no use to him now.
See how practical the religious leaders were. They picked the money up off the floor (no sense letting valuable money go to waste).
See how scrupulous the religious leaders were about how this kind of money could be utilized.
• Can we accept money that’s been acquired by unjust means?
• How can we legitimately allocate the proceeds of crime?
• Are there legal restrictions or limitations on its usage?
It took a while but eventually they figured out a technically legal way to use the money.
See how Judas resolved his sorrow. When the religious people shrugged him off suicide was the only way he could think of to handle his contrition.
It’s perplexing since real sorrow & real repentance are usually a guarantee of forgiveness. But it looks like Judas had passed a point of no returning.
Judas’ story is one of the saddest in the bible.

Note: quotes from Matthew 27:2 4 (NLT)

Week 38  Matthew 22

The Lord told the Sadducees straight-up: your problem is that you don’t know the scriptures.
So the implication is pretty clear. There are two possible outcomes to bible reading:
Outcome A: I can read the bible but not know it
Outcome B: I can read it and know it.
(Outcome A is a bit tricky because – for instance – I could be reading the bible for the first time and not really get it. That’s completely possible. But even though I’m not getting it I can still be an Outcome B reader because even if I’m not getting it my basic long-range goal is to get it – eventually. It’s what I’m determined to do.)
Anyway since I want to be an Outcome B reader I’ve adopted a couple of basic rules – one is simple but the other isn’t.
The simple one is that when I’m reading the bible I try to keep in mind that it’s a non-fiction book (which needs a different mentality than if I’m reading fiction or fantasy or mythology).
The second rule is that when I read I try to let the bible tell me what it’s saying – not me tell it. (As simple as it sounds it’s a hard rule to remember and harder to do since it’s way easier for me to tell the bible what it’s allowed to say rather than me just listening to it.)

Note: quote from Matthew 22:29 (NLT)

Week 37  Matthew 21

These two verses caught my attention: if you have faith and don’t doubt you can do things like this (the fig-tree-miracle) and much more…If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.
So there’s Two Guarantees:
Guarantee #1: I can get the ability to do miraculous things
Guarantee #2: I can get everything I ask the Lord for.
Pretty good guarantees…but I notice three things that have to happen first: 1) I have to have faith. 2) I have to not be a doubter. 3) I have to believe.
Looking at the three I figure that ‘faith’ in verse 21 is roughly equal to ‘belief’ in verse 22. So I’ve got Faith / Belief on one side. And on the other side is Doubt.
I visualize two continuums:
First there’s the Faith/Belief Continuum…
Almost No Faith —————————- A Lot of Faith
Second there’s the Doubt Continuum…
Almost Total Doubt ————————- No Doubt At All.
I think the Lord is saying that two (similar) things have to be going on at the same time for the Two Guarantees to happen. I have to be gradually moving along both lines from left-to-right: Boosting my Faith and at the same time Off-loading my Doubt.
This is useful to know. Matthew’s two continuums explain what’s needed so I can achieve the Two Guarantees.
Unfortunately Matthew doesn’t explain the process of how to boost my faith or tamp down my doubt.
So I’ll need to be looking somewhere else for those How-Tos.

Note: quotes from Matthew 21:21-22 (NLT)

Week 37  Matthew 21

The Lord told his disciples: if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.
Right away I latch onto the phrase you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. It’s an attention-grabber (subconsciously I do a quick mental paraphrase: ‘I’ll get whatever I ask the Lord for’).
Anyway a couple of questions a bible-reader asks pretty regularly are:
a) what does this verse mean?
b) what does it not mean?
So I ask myself b): what does it not mean? And I see right away it doesn’t mean ‘I’ll get whatever I ask the Lord for’ because the verse doesn’t say that. It says: if you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer. Meaning that I’ll receive whatever I ask for in prayer as long as I believe.
I’ve made a rookie reader’s gaff. I don’t know if there’s an official name for it (let’s call it the Personal Preference Bias). It’s basically that while I’m reading I’m doing two things: 1) I’m latching onto what I like (for instance ‘I’ll get whatever I ask the Lord for’) and 2) I’m skipping over irrelevant-seeming things (for instance ‘if I believe’).
I get a sinking-feeling that the believing part is going to put a serious dent in the asking-and-getting part.
I can ask the Lord for a million things. What I get is what’s caught in the Belief Filter.

Note: quote from Matthew 21:22 (NLT)

Week 37  Matthew 13

Jesus knew some of his stories were hard to understand but he said that: anyone who is willing to hear should listen and understand. So ‘willingness’ was part of the mix. He said ‘openness’ was too (if people are open to my teaching more understanding will be given). Willingness & Openness.
He had already said that the disciples had been permitted to understand the secrets but that other (people) had not.
I wonder about why some people were ‘permitted’ to understand but others were not (it almost makes it look like the Lord is a Big Secret Keeper and he only lets a few select insiders in on the secret). But I figure it’s just as likely (and makes pretty good sense) that the ‘insiders’ were the ones who were Willing & Open. If that’s true then the ‘outsiders’ were likely Unwilling & Closed.
On one side: to people who are open to my teaching, more understanding will be given, and they will have an abundance of knowledge.
On the other: to those who are not listening, even what they have will be taken away from them.
Personally I think it would be nice if everyone was an insider. A kind of inclusive big-tent universal admission to knowing. But what if I was a person who didn’t want to a) hear or b) listen or c) understand? Would I even want to be an insider?

Note: quotes from Matthew 13:9 12 11 (NLT)