Medicine Hat Joe

Week 49 Hebrews

Right away the writer starts dividing things up into Thens & Nows.
Then: God…spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways.
Now: in these last days (God) has spoken to us in His Son.
Of the two you get the sense pretty quickly that the writer’s big concern is the Now – by the time he’s thirty words in he starts giving details about the Son, about Jesus Christ.
If I’d decided in August to jot down all the other things I found about the Lord after I’d finished the gospels I’d definitely be writing down things from Hebrews 1:
(God) has spoken to us through his Son
God promised everything to the Son as an inheritance
Through the Son (God) made the universe and everything in it
The Son reflects God’s own glory
Everything about (the Son) represents God exactly
(The Son) sustains the universe by the mighty power of his command.
These aren’t simple ideas. But this kind of information really bulks up what I learned about Jesus in the gospel stories. And since the gospels already showed me a pretty muscular Lord, some of this post-gospels material really piles on substance, complexity, and dimension. The outside-the-gospel writers supplement what I learned about the gospel-Lord. There’s more to him than meets the eye.
[I’d like to be more alert to that next time through.]

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

Week 49 Philemon

Paul wrote this letter to a man he already knew. The man hosted church meetings in his own home. He was Philemon.
The letter to Philemon was about a runaway slave named Onesimus. While he was on the lam he had come to belief in the Lord (probably after running into Paul). The ironic thing – and the reason Paul wrote about him – was that Philemon was the man Onesimus had escaped from. Philemon owned Onesimus!
You have to figure that Paul & Onesimus had some serious what-to-do-now conversations. In the end Onesimus decided he had to return to his master.
The interesting twist that Paul puts on Onesimus’ return to Philemon is that his slave is coming back: no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother.
Technically that wasn’t entirely true because believing in the Lord didn’t alter Onesimus’ legal status as a slave.
What Paul was driving at was that even though Onesimus was formally still in a state of institutional bondage, he was also more-than-a-slave.
In the first-century political-legal Roman world Onesimus was just as much a slave after he believed in the Lord as he was before. Belief didn’t work any social-status miracles for Onesimus in the material world.
What it did do was add a whole new dimension on the non-material side. Which would have been a ticklish thing for both Philemon and Onesimus. Legally master & slave; but brothers & equals in-the-Lord.

Note: quote from Philemon 16 (NASB)

Week 49 1 Timothy

Bible writers sometimes tell us exactly why they’re writing, and that’s what Paul does right in the middle of this letter. He tells Timothy he wrote: so that you will know how people must conduct themselves in the household of God. This is the church of the living God, which is the pillar and support of the truth.
So 1 Timothy was Paul’s Guide-to-Conduct-in-the-Church. I scanned backward and forward looking for what-all Paul included.
A few of the big-ticket items were:
prayer in the church
women in the church
leaders in the church
needy people in the church
conflict in the church
slaves in the church
money & wealth in the church, and
teaching in the church.
Some pretty interesting topics that make me regret that I’m hurrying to read through.
The church has all kinds: men and women, old & young, rich & poor, powerful & powerless. A mixed company, all of us more or less committed to the Lord, all of us part of the church of the living God, and all of us with our centrifugal pulls of gender, wealth, opinion, influence and age whirling away and pulling us apart.
It seems like a pretty shaky group. But Paul isn’t fooled, and calls it the pillar and support of the truth.

Note: quote from 1 Timothy 3:15 (NLT). I forgot my end of the month tally yesterday so checked today: I’ve read 1662 of 1730 pages. 96% finished in 92% of the year.

Week 49 1 Timothy

While I’ve been reading-through this year I’ve had one Big Focus – to read everything right through. But back in about February I decided to tack on a secondary exercise, and that was to record verses that said something about what the Lord is like.
So I struck gold in chapter one. Paul is talking to Timothy but then it’s like all-of-a-sudden he’s addressing the Lord: now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever.
I think Paul is mainly showing respect for the Lord here, but in the process he names specific features about him.
I added three to my What’s-the-Lord-Like list:
The Lord is eternal, there’s a Permanency of Existence quality;
The Lord is invisible. A spirit doesn’t register on my optic nerves (so if seeing-is-believing then I’m in trouble); and,
The Lord is unique; there’s just nothing else to compare him to.
I haven’t tried subdividing my list but if I did I’d put these three under something like Difference-Emphasizing Qualities. All of them tend to put quite a bit of distance between the Lord and me – actually quite-a-bit-more than quite-a-bit. The discrepancy between us gives me a sense of unease.
Still, feeling unease about the Super-Qualities of the Lord isn’t a deal-breaker for me because I figure that the more closely I could identify him & me the less & less like God he becomes.

Note: quote from 1 Timothy 1:17 (NASB)

Week 48 2 Thessalonians

People in the church in Thessalonica discovered that believing in the Lord included getting bashed by some of the people around them. So Paul started his letter by consoling them. He also told them: God will use this persecution to show his justice. For he will make you worthy of his kingdom…and in his justice he will punish those who persecute you.
It looks to me like there are two things going on. The first is that persecutees will in some way be made more worthy by going through hardships. But I leave that idea and move on to the second thing – that persecutors will be punished.
That gets my attention because Paul says that persecutors: will be punished with everlasting destruction, forever separated from the Lord.
Which seems to me like an awful outcome. I wonder how I would feel being in a lonesome, changeless state of isolation, of being cut off, and of remaining exactly and perpetually who-I-am-right-now from now on. Doesn’t seem so good to me.
On the other hand maybe that’s just my way of thinking. Maybe a person who currently thinks of the Lord as a kind of gargoylian monstrosity will in future get to go on thinking the same thing forever – a sort of continuity-of-belief. Maybe the afterlife just locks in and kind of petrifies what I think and am now. A rigor mortis of the soul.

Note: quotes from 2 Thessalonians 1:5-6, 9 (NLT)

Week 48 1 Thessalonians

Paul has a pretty interesting section about the Lord coming back to earth to wrap everything up. Eighteen verses running from the end of chapter four on into chapter five.
Sometimes it’s hard to know exactly why writers choose certain topics, say certain things. I wonder why Paul told them: we who are still living when the Lord returns will not rise to meet him ahead of those who are in their graves.
I’m sitting thinking about the phrase ahead-of-those, wondering why Paul said that.
Were people in Thessalonica concerned that the living would get an advantage? That the dead were handicapped because they’re dead? (In a material world you’d be inclined to think that a live guy would just, by definition have a clear jump on a dead guy.)
I’m wondering if Paul is reassuring them that living people won’t get a head start, that being dead doesn’t disadvantage me at the resurrection.
He spells it out this way: the dead in Christ shall rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. All together.
Anyway even though I’m not exactly sure what the question-behind-the-answer was, that doesn’t really jam me up because I’m pretty solid on two basic things: a) the Lord will come back to earth; and b) if we believe in him we’ll go to be with him.

Note: quotes from 1 Thessalonians 4:15 (NLT), 4:16-17 (NASB)

Week 48 1 Thessalonians

Paul is thinking back to his arrival in the Macedonian city and says: when you received from us the word of God’s message, you accepted it not as the word of men, but for what it really is, the word of God, which performs its work in you who believe.
When Paul got to Thessalonica nobody – as far as I know – knew who he was. No one knew his reputation as a high-profile apostle, or suspected he’d go on to have maybe a bigger influence on the church than anyone for two-thousand years. He was just a guy who showed up and gave a public address. And the people listening to him had a decision to make. Either this is just a speech the guy made up out of his own brain, or it’s a message from God.
Nine times out of ten you’ll think that the guy just made-it-up. Messages from God are pretty rare, pretty unlikely.
But for some reason people there in Thessalonica believed Paul. You wonder why someone starts believing in the Lord. Quits believing what he believed and starts believing what he didn’t.
The decision was theirs to make and some of them decided to turn from their idols and serve the living and true God.
A pretty momentous decision. You wonder what made them do it.

Note: quote from 1 Thessalonians 2:13 (NASB), 1:9 paraphrased

Week 48 1 Thessalonians

The church was in the city of Thessalonica. I remember the back-story of how Paul & Silas landed in a Philippian jail. When they got out they headed for Thessalonica.
I check my bible atlas. Thessalonica was probably a port town, tucked right up at the end of a big gulf on the north-western shoulder of the Aegean Sea. Looking east I see Apollonia, then Amphipolis, and then Philippi (maybe about two hundred crow-flying kilometres east of Thessalonica). The Thessalonica story in Acts says that Paul spoke to people in one of the synagogues. Some Jewish people believed in the Lord, and so did: a large group of godly Greek men and also many important women of the city. A mixed congregation.
The Acts story adds a sequel about an angry mob accusing Paul & Silas of insurrection. But in his letter Paul doesn’t make a big deal about getting run out of town. He focuses on what happened to the people who believed: you turned away from idols to serve the true and living God. And…you are looking forward to the coming of God’s Son from heaven.
It’s a condensed version, a synopsis of a believing person’s life. I realize my favourite idols aren’t any good to me; I turn away from them so that I’m facing the true and living God; and now I’m looking in the right direction for the Lord when he comes back from heaven.

Note: quotes from Acts 17:4, 1 Thessalonians 1:9-10 (NLT)

Week 48 Colossians

One benefit of reading through is that if I’m thinking about a topic and want to get a better idea of what-all the bible says about it then I get to track that idea all the way through…beginning to end.
I’ve been trying to keep a list of what the bible says about God. When I get to Colossians I see this: Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. So I record that God is invisible. I can’t see him.
In the material world we put quite a bit of weight on what we can see. Something I can see is way up on my believability scale. Invisible things? Way down. The demand for visibility is pretty strong. If I can’t see something then I’m asking: does it even exist? Seeing is believing.
Which means that God not being visible puts some downward pressure on the Believability Quotient.
But that’s all beside the point. I’m tracking what the bible does say about God, not what I think it should. And it says here that he’s invisible.

Note: quote from Colossians 1:15 (NLT). Because my What-is-God-Like list focuses on God and not Christ I’m most interested in the God-is-invisible part of this verse. But to tell you the truth I think I’m cheating a bit there. I think Paul’s big idea is that the invisible God – after a long stint of invisibility – is visible-ized starting in Matthew. The main point? The Lord Christ imagizes the invisible God.

Week 47 Philippians

One of my reading-through rules is: don’t look back!
But yesterday Paul said: don’t worry about anything . And since I was worried about something today I broke the rule and looked back.
I looked back at not worrying about anything.
On the surface Don’t Worry About Anything is a kind of nice sentiment. It even sounds like it has substance. But as a free-standing, independent slogan it’s not really too helpful or useful. It tells me not to feel what I’m feeling. Not be what I’m being. And not much else.
Today I notice that verse six isn’t just four words long after all. Paul started with the four words: Don’t Worry About Anything. But then he went right on to add:
instead pray about everything
tell God what you need
thank him for all he has done.
So Paul is offering me an Anxiety Alternative.
He’s not saying don’t worry and just try to be happy.
He’s saying an if and a then – if you’re worried then you should pray to the Lord. According to Paul prayer is an actionable alternative to anxiety.
He seems to be saying that once I recognize I’m anxious I can take the step of telling the Lord, and even thanking him.
Speaking to the Lord is an Anxiety Management Tool.

Note: quote from Philippians 4:6 (NLT). And verse seven goes on to promise an alternative outcome, an anxiety replacement.