Medicine Hat Joe

Week 37 Mark

His daughter was dying so Jairus went to Jesus to plead with him to come and heal his girl.
But they arrived too late. People at the house told them the girl had died. Jesus disregarded them: the child isn’t dead; she is only asleep (the crowd hooted – they knew dead).
It made me wonder what the Lord thought about being-dead. Lots of modern people figure dead is dead. Talking about death-as-sleep is just softening the vocabulary. Death sleep is never-waking-up sleep. No emerging from unconscious rest to drowsy wakefulness. Just a non-stop forever incessant enduring permanency that stretches into the unending future. Sleep is a deceptive word because normal sleep ends when I wake up. Sleep without wake isn’t really sleep.
So I wonder if the Lord is using the word in a way that makes a different sense to him – an insider’s view of death. Maybe he’s saying that death really is like sleep. It’s the full cycle including: Step One) when I die and leave my current state of being – let’s say from consciousness-to-unconsciousness, and then Step Two) where I pass right on into a new state – let’s say unconsciousness-to-consciousness. Maybe that’s the norm: moving on from the sleep of death into a post-mortem state of wakeful awareness.
The miracle was miraculous because it halted the normal process. The girls’ sleep of death was interrupted & reversed when the Lord redirected her back into natural life in the material world.

Note: quote from Mark 5:39 (NLT)

Week 37 Mark

One of the Lord’s public teaching methods was to tell parables. He would tell a story about something that was pretty familiar and unmistakable. In chapter four he talks about a farmer planting seed and some of that seed grew and some didn’t. A simple story on the surface but also a two-level story. Mark says that: later, when Jesus was alone with the twelve disciples…they asked him, “What do your stories mean?” They knew that the simple farmer and his simple seed was a cover for a more complex farmer with his more complex bag of seed. They knew enough to know they didn’t really know.
Anyway the Lord goes on to spell out what the different elements of the parable meant (reading the explanation I know I wouldn’t be able to dope out the correct meaning in a hundred years).
Trying to understand what the Lord was teaching is a big job. Which means that reading-through is both a) simple, and b) difficult. Simple because anybody can read the words; difficult because not everyone will discover meanings.
Mark ends the paragraph with this tip from the Lord: anyone who is willing to hear should listen and understand! And be sure to pay attention to what you hear. The more you do this, the more you will understand…To those who are open to my teaching, more understanding will be given.
Willingness. Attentiveness. Openness. They’re all part of the understanding mix.

Note: quotes from Mark 4:10, 23-25 (NLT)

Week 37 Mark

The four gospel stories of the life of Jesus are told by four men who either knew the Lord personally or else knew people who did.
The Four Gospellers each came at the Lord from a different angle and I was reminded of that when I read Mark’s story of John the Baptist. John is the first person Mark talks about. About his preaching & baptizing. About baptizing Jesus. About being jailed by Herod – all in the first fourteen verses.
I flipped back to Matthew – he spent chapter three talking about John but waited ’til the next chapter to mention his arrest.
When I’m reading-through I almost never jump ahead but I did this time and looked at Luke’s story of John. Luke takes a big chunk of chapter three telling John’s story including his imprisonment (I saw that even though he talks about Jesus baptism he doesn’t say definitely that John baptized him).
John talks about John in chapter one – sixteen verses – and chapter three – fifteen verses.
Anyway based on my (ten minute) search it looks like Mark has the least to say about John.
But everyone seemed to agree John was a key player at the front-end of the Lord’s public work.
And I was reminded that the Four Gospellers all a) thought highly of John, but b) fitted him into their gospels in different ways. A kind of John the Baptist in four-part harmony. One person spotlighted in different ways. Which is about what you’d expect.

Week 37 Matthew

The Lord ran into quite a bit of opposition during his short life on earth and one of the groups that disagreed with him was the Sadducees. Matthew says that one day: some Sadducees stepped forward – a group of Jews who say there is no resurrection after death. They posed this question…
Matthew helps bible readers by telling us that the Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife. Their question was a rambling one about a woman who married seven different men. All seven died. The question was who – in the afterlife – would be her husband? It seems weird for a group that didn’t believe in post-mortem existence to ask for details about it.
Anyway what caught my attention was the Lord’s reply: your problem is that you don’t know the Scriptures (another bible version said you don’t understand the scriptures). The Sadducees were religious guys who did read the OT. But the Lord distinguished reading and accurate knowledge. The Sadducees read. And they thought they understood. But – according to the Lord – didn’t.
My project this year is to read through the bible. But I get a reminder today that reading is the ground-level part of the exercise. Understanding is the next floor up.
So my quick refresher…
a) it’s probably better to read than not read the bible
b) it’s potentially better to read without understanding than not read at all
c) it’s definitely better to read with understanding than without.

Note: quotes from Matthew 22:23 & 29 (NLT & NASB)

Week 36 Matthew

The Lord repeats the phrase six times in chapter five: you have heard…but I say. He was referring to the OT. What he thought about it.
I’m kind of glad to see that the Lord didn’t say the OT was useless and should be dumped (after all…I spent eight months reading it).
The Lord wasn’t flip-flopping the rules either. He didn’t say: Moses says, ‘Don’t murder people’…but I’m saying that you can!
What it looks like is that the Lord accepted the OT. The OT was essentially okay. His point was that it had been misunderstood. Maybe even misapplied. Trivialized. Mismanaged.
Moses gave the basic don’t-murder-people rule. The Lord’s supplement was: if you are angry with someone, you are subject to judgment. It’s like the Lord got out a map and surveyed all the points along the road to Murder. There were places on that road that were technically legal – for instance Hating. But in the Lord’s view they were all legitimately judgeable.
The OT isn’t being devalued in chapter five. The Lord isn’t saying that I can trash the OT law. More like: keep the law in the way it was originally meant to be kept.
When you get right down to it the OT’s version of the law was simpler than the Lord’s. He was actually amplifying the law. Complicating it. Intensifying it. The OT legal regime was pretty clean & straightforward. Then the Lord got his hands on it.

Note: quote from Matthew 5:22 (NLT)

Week 36 Matthew

Sometimes when I’m reading-through I make up exercises to help keep my mind on track – I’ll find a topic that interests me and look for all the places a writer talks about it.
Matthew six gave me a good idea for an exercise – it was to look for things that the Lord taught (I could call it: What Lessons Did the Lord Teach?)
The Sermon on the Mount is a long teaching passage. Right away I saw eight kinds of people who would be blessed by the Lord. They are people:
who realize their need of the Lord
who mourn
who are gentle and lowly
who are hungry and thirsty for justice
who are merciful
whose hearts are pure
who work for peace
who are persecuted because they live for God
One good thing about putting together a list like this is that it helps focus my attention.
On the downside this list might be pretty demoralizing. For example I sat looking at these eight things and did a quick personal inventory. I didn’t check off too many boxes.
I’d be in way better shape if I could get away with just recording the list. But at the end of his sermon the Lord said: anyone who listens to my teaching and obeys me is wise…but anyone who hears my teaching and ignores it is foolish.

Note: quotes from Matthew 5:3-10 & 7:24-26 (NLT)

Week 36 Matthew

Back in the OT Isaiah had forecast that: the land of Zebulun and Naphtali will soon be humbled, but there will be a time in the future when Galilee of the Gentiles, which lies along the road that runs between the Jordan and the sea, will be filled with glory… (then Isaiah explained that promise).
Many years later Jesus moved to Capernaum. Matthew says that that relocation fulfilled Isaiah’s old prophecy: in the land of Zebulun and of Naphtali, beside the sea, beyond the Jordan River – in Galilee where so many Gentiles live – the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light…
I look at a map of the original land distribution in Joshua. Zebulun-Naphtali are up near the top of the map – west of the Sea of Chinnereth. I flip to a map of NT times. The Sea of Chinnereth is renamed the Sea of Galilee and there on the lakeshore is the town of Capernaum. This seems like a pretty decent prediction Isaiah made. The prophecy might be a little unfocussed around the edges but what are the odds of having someone he called wonderful-counselor mighty-God everlasting-father and prince-of-peace come north to live on the shores of Galilee?
I don’t know for sure. But it looks like some pretty great and luminous man from the family line of David has to show up in the region of the Sea of Galilee or else Isaiah is wrong.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 9:1-2, 6-7 & Matthew 4:15-16 (NLT)

Week 35 Matthew

Reading-through is a solitary exercise. I do it alone. But at the same time it’s a together-aloneness because lots of other people have read the bible. The apostles read the OT. Saint Augustine and Martin Luther and Catherine of Siena read the bible. Millions of people have.
Matthew four is a kind of unwelcome reminder to me that even though the bible-readers’ fraternity I belong to includes the Lord it also includes the devil. In the story of the temptation of Christ the devil tried tempting the Lord three times.
What I see first is that the Lord was very familiar with the bible because in each of the temptations he quoted OT passages to answer the devil.
What I see second is that the devil knew the bible too because he quoted a passage from Psalm 91.
There’s some general conclusions I come to:
a) good people read the bible;
b) evil people read the bible;
c) reading the bible doesn’t mean I’m a good guy;
d) there’s legitimate ways to use the bible;
e) there’s illegitimate ways to use the bible;
f) if I haven’t read the bible for myself I might get buffaloed by someone who has;
g) quoting what the bible says isn’t necessarily saying what the bible means.
But I think my big take-away is that the devil reads & knows the bible and (it looks like) he might be prepared to use it against me.

Week 35 Matthew

A group of astronomer-astrologers appeared in King Herod’s court and asked: where is the newborn king of the Jews? We have seen his star as it arose, and we have come to worship him. That wasn’t good news and the king was: deeply disturbed by their question. Herod called in top Jewish religious specialists and asked them only one geographic question: where did the prophets say the Messiah would be born?
They told him that the prophetic forecast said: O Bethlehem of Judah, you are not just a lowly village in Judah, for a ruler will come from you who will be the shepherd for my people Israel. So the Messiah had to be born in Bethlehem.
I paged back to the Micah cross-reference: but you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah, are only a small village in Judah. Yet a ruler of Israel will come from you, one whose origins are from the distant past…
I checked a map in the back of my bible to see how many cities were in Israel in Micah’s time. I counted about 55 west of the Jordan River. I think that’s a low estimate so if Micah was just picking a name out-of-a-hat then he had no better than a 1-in-55 probability of getting it right. His percentage chance would be low. Bethlehem was a longshot.
I’m impressed that Micah got it right. A Messiah born in Jezreel wouldn’t be the Messiah.

Note: quotes from Matthew 2:2, 3, 4, 6 & Micah 5:2 (NLT)

Week 35 Matthew

When I start reading a new book I figure there’ll be new stuff to learn.
A good example is in chapter two where King Herod calls in: all the chief priests and scribes of the people. Scribes? I check another version and instead of chief priests and scribes it says: the leading priests and teachers of religious law. So…scribes are teachers of religious law.
I check a word book and see this is the first time in the NT that scribes are mentioned (but they’re not a brand new species that suddenly emerged in Matthew – scribes are mentioned in Kings & Chronicles and in Ezra & Nehemiah. Ezra actually was a scribe).
So anyway that explains why Herod called them in – they were religious specialists. They were bible readers-and-studiers and they knew the answer to Herod’s question. I’ve still got the word book open on my lap and see that Matthew referred to scribes 21 times. I take four minutes to scan those verses. It looks to me like Matthew only says either value-neutral or else negative things about scribes (even a positive-sounding thing turns sour when the Lord says: the teachers of religious law…are the official interpreters of the Scriptures. So practice and obey whatever they say to you, but don’t follow their example).
Scribes were OT-readers, a professional society of religious & legal specialists & bible teachers. But they were still on the outside-looking-in.

Note: quotes from Matthew 2:4 (NASB & NLT) & 23:2-3 (NLT)