Medicine Hat Joe

Week 27  Isaiah 28

Isaiah says that the Lord will do what he calls his unusual task and his extraordinary work (another version says a strange, unusual thing).
The Lord engages in (at least) two kinds of work-activities. First there’s the Usual and Non-Strange Work of the Lord (Isaiah doesn’t actually say that but he implies it). Then there’s another kind of work. When it comes to actually passing-judgment on people the Lord transitions to the Strange & Unusual Work he has to do.
The strange-&-unusual work of the Lord is – unfortunately – to destroy his own people. I think it’s safe to say that the Non-Strange work of the Lord doesn’t include destroying people. But his Strange work does.
Anyway Isaiah moves on in the next paragraph to add an agricultural illustration. It’s about an experienced farmer who knows his job. Knows what work there is to do and when’s the right time to do it. He also knows what work not to do and when not to do it.
If the parable of the farmer relates to the Lord’s action – which I think it does – the connection is that the Lord – like the farmer – does circumstance-specific work that needs doing when it’s time to do it. And he does different things that need doing when they need doing.
The parable explains about doing things that need doing.
But even so the Strange & Unusual Work of the Lord is still pretty sobering.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 28:1 (NASB & NLT) 21 (NLT) & 28:23-29

Week 27  Isaiah 24-27

Isaiah puts together this grouping of four chapters where some of the material sounds like he’s talking about the end-of-the-world:
The Lord is going to lay waste the earth and devastate it; the earth will be completely laid waste and totally plundered
The earth is broken up, the earth is split asunder, the earth reels like a drunkard…so heavy it falls — never to rise again. In that day the Lord will punish the powers in the heavens above and the kings on the earth below. The moon will be dismayed, the sun ashamed
On this mountain the Lord Almighty…will swallow up death forever. The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth
The Lord is coming out of his dwelling to punish the people of the earth for their sins. In that day, the Lord will punish…Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent.
Some of the material is about Moab & Egypt & Assyria. But some of it sounds like Revelation. Some of it sounds like near-term forecasts and some like long-term.
A person listening to Isaiah speaking 2500 years ago would likely think that these chapters were all about near-term outcomes.
Me reading it today? Some of it sounds near-term (meaning they happened already). But some sound like they’re yet to come.
One more-or-less continuous-sounding prophecy but with two terminal points. And the border between them is pretty fuzzy.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 24:1-3 18-23 25:6-10 26:20-27:1 (NLT)

Week 27  Isaiah 5

Isaiah says that destruction is certain for you who buy up land so others have no place to live… What would this look in 2024?
Let’s say I’m a rich guy and I buy up properties & houses and then improve them so I can sell them to lower-income people at affordable prices so they get started and get ahead and eventually succeed. Nothing much wrong with buying to help others who can’t.
The other option – the kind that Isaiah is talking about – is more like this. Let’s say I’m a rich guy and I buy up a lot of properties. Poor people can’t afford a house so they have to rent space from me. And I keep my rents high enough that my renters are stuck. They never get ahead. But I do.
It’s a slightly different situation but I heard about a billionaire who’s buying up a lion’s-share of the farmland south of the border. I wonder why.
It’s possible he’s going to grow affordable crops so that poorer people don’t get ripped-off and have to go hungry during a food-crisis. Nothing much wrong with that.
But if he’s buying land so he can a) control agricultural production and b) set high food prices and c) make a big profit so that d) poor people can barely afford food? Well then he’ll be in the driver’s seat. But according to Isaiah only temporarily.

Note: quote from Isaiah 5:8 (NLT). Reading report end-of-June: 679 of 1189 chapters = 57%.

Week 26  Isaiah 1

This is a good section on religious practice. It’s a reminder that the obvious & visible religious & ceremonial parts of religion (for instance killing an animal for a burnt offering) will only get me so far. Isaiah makes that pretty clear right up front. The Lord is sick of Israel’s religious practices:
Animal sacrifices? Sick-of-them
Incense? Sick-of-it
Religious festivals? Sick-of-them
Fasting? Sick-of-it
Prayers? Sick-of-them.
It’s a serious situation when the Lord is sick of religion.
Isaiah doesn’t leave it there. He tells them why the Lord is sick-of-religion: because your hands are covered with the blood of your innocent victims (so…formal religious practice + bloody hands = sickening religion).
Fortunately Isaiah gives the Lord’s starter solution: wash yourselves and be clean. Let me no longer see your evil deeds. Give up your wicked ways.
Fortunately (again) Isaiah then recommends follow-up steps – several concrete things-to-do:
learn to do good
seek justice
help the oppressed
defend the orphan
fight for the rights of widows
Unfortunately Isaiah doesn’t spell out a third-level solution. For example he said to help the oppressed but he didn’t spell-out an action-step to actually help-the-oppressed  (like maybe giving donations to the food bank). That might come later in the book. Or maybe Isaiah figured I could dope them out for myself.
Either way religious formalities & ritual actions aren’t stand-alone projects. No doubt they’re okay as far as they go. Where they get to isn’t far enough.

Note: quotes from Isaiah 1:15 16 17 (NLT)

Week 26  Job 42

As I got to the end of the book I wondered what I’d say if someone asked me: “what do you think are Job’s top three comments?”
There’s quite a bit to choose from. In Job there’s about 1069-verses and Job himself spoke 522 of them (by my count). So 48.8% of the book is the words of Job. But I didn’t have much trouble finding my Top Three.
The first was where Job’s wife told Job to curse-God-and-die. Job told her she was foolish. And asked a great question: shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?
The second was where Job said: I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God. Under the circumstances this is a pretty eye-opening and far-seeing and heroic view to take (and almost sounds like Job had read the NT.)
The third is my favorite. After the Lord’s long speech Job throws up the white-flag. He admits: surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes. Despite all his qualities and virtues Job realized that – confronted by the Lord – despising himself and repenting was the obvious thing to do.

Note: quotes from Job 2:10 19:25-26 42:3-6 (NIV)

Week 26  Job 20 & 21

Reading these two chapter back-to-back I realized how far apart Job and his friend Zophar really were.
Zophar’s view was that even if evil people were successful their success was temporary. The hammer would soon fall.
the joy of the godless person lasts but a moment
he will perish forever
he will not enjoy the profit from his trading
his prosperity will not endure
terrors will come over him
a flood will carry off his house
Job’s view was quite a bit different. He thought it was obvious that evil people were not only successful but that their success could last a lifetime.
the wicked live on, growing old an increasing in power
their homes are safe and free from fear
they spend their years in prosperity and go to the grave in peace
the evil man is spared from the day of calamity
who repays him for what he has done?
watch is kept over his tomb
Zophar figured that bad living was going to result in bad life outcomes.
Job on the other hand said an evil person living a consistently bad life could still end up having pretty good and successful life outcomes. And that’s why he finally told Zophar: how can you console me with your nonsense? Nothing is left of your answers but falsehood. Friends I guess…but on opposite sides of the fence.

Note: Zophar quotes from Job 20:5 7 12 & 15 18 21 25 28. Job quotes from Job 21:7 9 13 30 31 32 34 (NIV)

Week 26  Job 32

Yesterday I read what frustrated Eliphaz Bildad & Zophar (EBZ) about Job: he was righteous in his own eyes. That’s the gist of the Job vs. EBZ debate – they thought Job was wrong because he was righteous in his own eyes.
The EBZ Rule was: a bad person experiences negative consequences. Things were going badly for Job therefore Job had to have done something bad. Bad things don’t happen to good people. They happen to bad people.
I got to thinking about the upshots of my life inputs. If I whittle it down to pretty simple terms I can practice either a) good life inputs or b) bad life inputs. And the results will be either a) good upshots or b) bad upshots.
Working with those four factors I end up with four basic combinations:
1. Good upshots can happen to people with good inputs
2. Bad upshots can happen to people with bad inputs
3. Good upshots can happen to people with bad inputs
4. Bad upshots can happen to people with good inputs.
EBZ were operating on a two-option model:
1. Good upshots happen to people with good inputs
2. Bad upshots can happen to people with bad inputs
Even though EBZ never got a chance to read Galatians they knew very well that a man reaps what he sows.
What they didn’t read and didn’t realize was that sometimes a man also reaps what he doesn’t sow.

Note: quotes from Job 32:1 & Galatians 6:7 (NIV)

Week 26  Job 32

I don’t know who wrote the book of Job but whoever it was didn’t get much opportunity for creative input. He was mostly a stenographer copying and recording the speeches of Job and Eliphaz Bildad Zophar (EBZ) & Elihu.
I wondered how much the editor actually said for himself so I went back and counted the verses. I found 47 descriptive verses plus another 23-verses of intros (Job said this. Eliphaz said that). There’s about 1069-verses in Job so that means that the editor only got to write his own comments in 6.5% of the book.
Anyway the point is that here in chapter 32 the writer is writing his own 6-verse introductory comments about Elihu and he summarized chapters 3-31 like this: EBZ stopped answering Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes. This was an interesting phrase to me: Job was righteous in his own eyes (another version says that Job kept insisting on his innocence).
So if someone asked me for a one-sentence synopsis of what Job thought about his situation it would be: “I am innocent”. And that was the whole reason for the conflict between Job & EBZ (and eventually Elihu).
Job: “I’m innocent”
EBZ&E: “You’re not innocent”
There’s not much room for negotiation there. There’s mostly room for debate.

Note: quote from Job 32:1 (NIV & NLT). The verse-number counts are approximate so don’t take them to the bank.

Week 25  Job 1 & 2

I was thinking about Satan again. Wondering about him.
I got out my word book and looked up “Satan”. I was surprised to see that the name only shows up eighteen times in the OT. Once in Chronicles. Three times in Zechariah. And fourteen times right here in Job 1 & 2.
In those first two chapters of Job Satan’s view starts to take shape. He said that Job (who the Lord described as blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil) was only loyal to the Lord because he is wealthy and successful.
Satan asked: if Job’s wealth & his health were gone what would Job do?
Satan answered: he’d curse the Lord!
Satan’s Theory of Religious Devotion was that loyalty to the Lord was directly connected to Life Circumstances. There were two linked principles:
1) When life is good then my devotion & loyalty are stronger
2) But if things go bad God gets shelved.
It’s a pretty straightforward view and I’m pretty sure Satan isn’t the only one who has it.
Satan thought that by dialing-back the good circumstances of Job’s life he would produce a negative religious impact.
I think Satan was onto something. Which means I have to keep in mind to not hitch my faith-in-the-Lord wagon to the good life.
Good things in life might tell me something affirmative about the Lord.
But bad times have nothing negative to tell me about him.

Note: quote from Job 1:8 (NIV)

Week 25  Job 1

The second scene in the book is an odd one. Satan appears before the Lord. They are on speaking-terms. The Lord asks Satan where have you come from? and Satan replies from roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it.
The book of Job doesn’t say how much roaming around on earth Satan does.
I check a word book and see that ‘roaming’ is only used twice in the bible – both in Job. The back of the word book says roaming can also mean things like:
go back and forth
move to and fro
roam to and fro
rush back and forth.
They aren’t too helpful. I wonder if they apply to Satan.
The word ‘roam’ can give the impression of wandering (maybe even aimless wandering). That might be but in this case I don’t think there’s anything very aimless about Satanic roaming. My sense is that he’s very deliberate. Intentional. Diabolically-focused.
I check an NT cross-reference where Peter implies that Satan is roaming more-or-less all the time. He’s always on-the-prowl. The reason why? He’s looking for someone to devour.
In Job Satan’s roaming starts out seeming like it could be a pretty neutral activity. But only at first. I just have to read to the end of the chapter to see that Satan doesn’t operate in neutral. Satan on-the-roam is someone to be concerned about.

Note: quotes from Job 1:7 & 1 Peter 5:8 (NIV). Word meanings are from the Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible.