Medicine Hat Joe

Week 47 Philippians

In chapter three Paul is thinking back to some of the benefits he’d had – good family, social class, education, status, employment. Things like that.
Under normal circumstances we chalk those up as advantageous.
But now Paul’s rethinking the traditional advantage-disadvantage calculus. He’s expanding its scope; adding another factor. He says: I once thought all these things were so very important, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the priceless gain of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.
I get a sheet of paper and draw a table with two columns. The left-hand column is headed: Low Value, and the right column says: High Value. In Paul’s Comparative Value Table the right-hand column only has room for one item: knowing the Lord. Everything else goes on the left.
No matter how many really good things – all the under-normal-circumstances High Value things – that I’ve got going for me…all of them go under Low Value.
Of course it’s not an absolute scale (fortunately). It’s a comparative one. And the key thing for me to keep in perspective is that knowing the Lord is so stupendously, astronomically, titanically, gigantesquely more valuable than all my other advantages, skills, efforts and benefits combined that, by comparison everything else is more-or-less valueless.

Note: quote from Philippians 3:7-8 (NLT)

Week 47 Philippians

There was conflict in the church in Philippi and so Paul offered some conflict-reduction advice. Three verses – seven quick-hitters – on unity-in-the-community. The one that slowed me down a bit was: be humble, thinking of others as better than yourself.
Humble is easier to read and say than be.
Anyway Paul went on to use an example of someone being humble. The Lord!
I thought back to the four gospels and remembered stories about the Lord teaching, advising, helping, healing. But now Paul is telling me a kind of preface, a back story:
Though he was God, he did not…cling to his rights as God
He made himself nothing
He took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form
And in human form he obediently humbled himself even further by dying.
The humbling of the Lord. The Great Reduction.
So this is a bit of a Supplement to the Gospels, something to add to the gospel-story mix. In all his teaching, advising, helping, healing, in all his fame and notoriety the Lord was operating as a slave. A giant step-down from majesty.
And getting back to his original point Paul wonders why I should be surprised at having to be humble-as-a-slave.
By comparison to the Lord it’s only a Little Reduction for me. Still, it’s a very hard thing to do.

Note: quotes from Philippians 2:3, 6-8 (NLT)

Week 46 Ephesians

I read the last two chapters of Ephesians today.
One of the verses said: let no one deceive you with empty words. It was underlined, so it had made some kind of impression on me before.
Empty words.
When I see a clear glass bottle with nothing inside I say it’s empty. If I tip it over nothing comes out. What value can it offer me? None. So I tend to think that the empty bottle’s contents are just neutral nothingness, value = zero.
But Paul seems to be saying that even though an empty word has nothing it can actually give me, it can take something away. Because an empty word can deceive.
You’d figure that if an empty word’s value is not +100, not +10, not even +1 then its value is zero. But from the sound of it empty words keep heading south past zero into negative country: -1, -10, -100.
It sounds like an empty word can be positively nothing, and negatively something. Floating around in its apparently Neutral Xero-ness it isn’t value-neutral – it’s more like value-negative.
I wonder how many words I hear in a day. Ten thousand? I wonder about estimating their value.
I thought about the serpent sliding into paradise with his empty words. In my bible there are only forty-five of them in Genesis three. Positively empty words, but super-potent in deceptual-izing negative power.

Note: quote from Ephesians 5:6 (NASB)

Week 46 Ephesians

I noticed it today because of what I read yesterday.
On Wednesday Paul wrote a description of what a guy’s condition is before he believes in the Lord (the account is pretty hard to swallow; my guess is that many people won’t because of its unappealing taste).
Then today I get to chapter four and Paul is telling his audience not to be like people who don’t believe. He says: they are hopelessly confused. Their closed minds are full of darkness; they are far away from the life of God because they have shut their minds and hardened their hearts against him. They don’t care anymore about right and wrong, and they have given themselves over to immoral ways. Their lives are filled with all kinds of impurity and greed.
Reading Wednesday-Thursday back-to-back is doubly depressing.
Anyway…two things:
I’m reading through and trying to put things together as I go. What the bible says about ground-level human being is pretty important, and I’ve landed on some good material about it two consecutive days.
Second thing I notice is this. Paul is writing to believers. He’s talking here about how people who believe live; should live. And he starts by telling them how not to: live no longer as the ungodly. Which sounds to me like people who believe in the Lord could be living – maybe are living – like the ungodly.
Which sounds like life-after-belief has potential to be kind of muddy.

Note: quote from Ephesians 4:17-19 (NLT)

Week 46 Ephesians

There’s a sort-of concept in bible reading that I call the Don’t-Really-Get-It-Until-Later Principle. It goes like this:
I read something;
I don’t get it;
I keep reading;
Then I read something later that throws light on the something I didn’t get.
I thought about that today when I read chapter two. Paul’s talking about what life is like for people before they believe the Lord. The way he described it was:
Once you were dead
Doomed forever because of your many sins…
Obeying Satan, the mighty prince of the power of the air
He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to believe God
All of us used to live that way, following the passions and desires of our evil nature.
So how does that relate to the Don’t-Really-Get-It-Until-Later Principle? When I read chapter two I thought back more than ten months to Adam and Eve. Genesis says they disobeyed, were expelled from Eden, and had to make their way in a fallen world. The story is pretty thin gruel. But Ephesians supplements it with extra information: suddenly A&E were internally dead, naturally evil, staring doom in the face, completely whammied by the smooth demonic spirit who’d crawled into their souls and poisoned their systems.
Not very happy reading. But it made chapter two a value-added text for me.

Note: quote from Ephesians 2:1-3 (NLT)

Week 46 Ephesians

Halfway through the first chapter I realize I’ve been dropped into the deep end of the pool.
That first long paragraph – verses three-to-fourteen – is content heavy to say the least.
I was wondering what I could do with it. Thought it might be an idea to copy out each phrase one-under-the-other like an ingredient list. See if re-formatting it might help open up anything for me.
But I didn’t have time.
What I did do was write the verse numbers – 3, 4, 5…14 – in a column down the page. Then I re-read each verse, counted up how many distinct-information-phrases (DIPs) I could find and wrote the number beside each verse. There were about 21 DIPs in the twelve verses.
That exercise didn’t help much. I still had the feeling that Paul was kind of piling-on with a lot of DIPs (some of them pretty complicated). Wondering why.
It occurred to me that something else might be going on. I’d just finished reading Galatians and in Galatians Paul reduced the gospel to a pretty basic formula: if I believe that the Lord lived, died as my substitute, and came back to life, then I’ll be born into spiritual life. That’s it.
So was Paul changing his tune for the Ephesians? Adding-on a bunch of extras? I really doubt it. He’d already said what he thought of different gospels. I think it’s the same gospel but here in Ephesians drawn up in quite a bit more detail.

Week 46 Ephesians

Galatians-Ephesians-Philippians-Colossians.
Four letters written by Paul.
Averaging five chapters and 126 verses each.
The longest is just a bit over seven pages, the shortest almost five.
I don’t know why but I tend to lump the four letters together. Consecutive order. Similar size. A kind of Ancient Near-Eastern Literary Quartet. It’s an imaginary similarity that I’ve created inside my head. I’m sure those four places were different so I admit I’m likely wrong clumping them. But I wonder ‘how wrong?’
Like if I was in Mombasa last week, Mumbai this week, Hanoi next week, finished the month in Vladivostok and then told you that they were all kind of the same then I guess you would wonder about that, wonder ‘how wrong is Joe?’
So I’m looking for differences.

Note: I’m already finished Galatians. I saw there that a big problem for the churches – and a big concern for Paul – was that an unidentified guy who was a believer in the Lord, a guy who agreed that the Lord was great and that his death and resurrection were terrific, had kind of cloak-and-daggered a hybridized version of the gospel into the church: believe in the Lord and practice OT regulations. So, one of Paul’s big points was that the gospel plus something else isn’t the gospel anymore.

Week 46 Galatians

I noticed it when I got to chapter three. Paul said: O foolish Galatians! What magician has cast an evil spell on you?
It sounded as though Paul didn’t know the identity of this guy who was operating in Galatia. I wasn’t sure about that so I did something I didn’t really have time to do. I went back and re-read the letter – really quickly.
I found this:
You are being fooled by those who twist and change the truth concerning Christ.
You were getting along so well. Who has interfered with you to hold you back from following the truth?
God will judge that person, whoever it is, who has been troubling and confusing you.
Which sounds like Paul didn’t know exactly who the guy was.
What Paul did know was that the guy was trying to change the gospel. Fundamentally change it.
Paul’s gospel was that if I believe that the Lord’s death and resurrection has taken care of my guilt then I’m spiritually reborn.
So when the Mystery Man of Galatia came along and said that if I believe that the Lord’s death and resurrection has taken care of my guilt, and additionally if I follow a prescription of OT regulations then I’m spiritually reborn, then that’s a different gospel.
Churches can accept all kinds of different opinions about things. But not different gospels.

Note: quotes from Galatians 3:1, 1:7, 5:7, 5:10 (NLT)

Week 45 Galatians

Yesterday Paul mentioned a Different Gospel but didn’t spell out what it was until chapter three today.
Really, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised since it already came up in Acts-Romans-Corinthians (even if it wasn’t called a Different Gospel). It was that Jewish people living with their OT-legal-tradition came to belief in the Lord and when they believed in the Lord they brought along their OT-legal-traditional beliefs with them.
Believing in the Lord plus practicing OT-legal-traditions wasn’t the big issue – Jewish people had to practice something. The big issue was that Jewish people (who believed) started telling non-Jewish people (who believed) that they had to start practicing Jewish OT-legal-traditions. Had to!
So in chapter three Paul talks about why OT-legal-tradition was not part of the Real Gospel. One of the tricky things about the Different Gospel was that it wasn’t an Absolutely Different Gospel. It was more like a Hybrid Gospel: a) believe in the Lord, and b) practice OT-legal-traditions. But Paul’s Gospel wasn’t a hybrid. It was just a) believe in the Lord.
Believing in the Lord is the one thing that brings you alive.

Note: Paul spent two-thirds of the chapter downgrading the OT-Law in a pretty unequivocal way – leaves me feeling that the Law is maybe: archaic, stupid, worthless, terrible, irrelevant, contrary to the gospel. (Paul pulls-in-his-horns in the last-third of the chapter and talks about the not-so-stupid functionality of OT-Law. No sense in going overboard.)

Week 45 Galatians

Yesterday Paul wrote to the Corinth church about a Different Jesus. And so right away today I noticed that Paul said it that the Galatian churches were deserting the Lord for what he called: a different gospel.
So…a Different Jesus yesterday in Corinth; a Different Gospel today in Galatia.
Yesterday I was wondering how I could fictionalize the real Jesus and make him into a Different Jesus.
Today I’m wondering what a Different Gospel looks like (I’ll wait and see what else Paul says).
Anyway I thought Paul’s opening greeting was pretty interesting: may grace and peace be yours from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. He died for our sins, just as God our Father planned, in order to rescue us from this evil world in which we live.
I don’t know if Paul was sneaking in a preview of key elements of the Real Gospel right out of the chute. But these sound like gospel-ideas…
The Lord died for my sins
His death was planned by his father
The reason he died was to rescue me from an evil world.
These three basic ideas sound pretty consistent with what I already read in Matthew-Mark-Luke-John-Acts.
So as of today I’ll keep them in mind as parts of the Real Gospel. And I’ll try to stay focused on where Paul takes it from there.

Note: quotes from Galatians 1:6 (NASB) and 1:3-4 (NLT).