Medicine Hat Joe

Week 44 1 Corinthians

The church in Corinth had some true-to-life un-churchly-like things going on.
One example was that a guy in the church did something wrong to another guy in the church – might have been anything: theft, fraud, embezzlement? – and now they’re going to battle it out in municipal court.
Paul talked about that conflict and gave a couple of pieces of advice. A pretty practical one was that other people in the church were perfectly capable of making a fair judgment call on this dispute. Why not deal with it in-house? Which made sense.
But then he said something that didn’t have much to do with practicality and didn’t make much common sense. He said that: to have such lawsuits at all is a real defeat for you. Why not just accept the injustice and leave it at that? Why not let yourselves be cheated?
Why not accept injustice, why not let yourself be cheated?
Crazy questions, a crazy and unrealistic idea.
While I sat thinking about it I remembered the Lord had said: don’t resist an evil person. Even if he slaps you in the face. Which is another crazy and unrealistic idea.
The church in Corinth was just doing the normal thing, the natural thing, the thing anybody would do, the way everybody was doing it.
Which I guess from what Paul said, was maybe where the problem began.

Note: quote from I Corinthians 6:7 (NLT); and the Sermon on the Mount Matthew 5:39-41

Week 44 1 Corinthians

In the first couple of chapters of Acts the church seemed to be so nice. The Ideal Church. But before long it started to look more like a Real Church (in search of the Ideal).
Same thing shows up right away in first Corinthians. Paul starts talking about quarrelling and disagreement in the church. The conflict was over ‘who’s pack do you belong to?’ It looked something like this:
Some Corinthians were loyal to Paul;
Some Corinthians were loyal to Apollos;
Some Corinthians were loyal to Peter;
Some Corinthians were loyal to Christ.
Segregated along party lines the church was perfectly positioned for an internal squabble.
This sounds like a totally contemporary situation.
For example:
I know a guy who went on a kind-of enlightenment-seeking pilgrimage to a big influential powerful aggressive church in California.
I know a guy who went on a kind-of enlightenment-seeking pilgrimage to a big influential powerful aggressive church in Australia.
If Guy #1 is now a California loyalist and Guy #2 is now an Australia loyalist they have a great opportunity to start sniping away at each other.
But Paul’s advice to Corinth then and Guy #1 – Guy #2 now would be: stop arguing among yourselves. Let there be real harmony so there won’t be divisions in the church. I plead with you to be of one mind, united in thought and purpose.
It’s a great, great bit of advice.
And it’s way, way easier to say than do.

Note: quote from I Corinthians 1:10 (NLT)

Week 44 Romans

Chapter sixteen is a postscript to the first fifteen.
Mostly it’s a list of people that Paul was greeting.
But Paul wasn’t greeting the first person on the list.
Phoebe was from the church in Cenchrea (I checked a bible map and saw that Cenchrea is near Corinth) and she would soon be travelling to Rome. So Paul was telling the Rome church: receive her in the Lord, as one who is worthy of high honor. Help her in every way you can, for she has helped many in their needs, including me.
As far as I know Phoebe is only mentioned this one time in the bible. She’s almost totally unknown. But what I do know is that there were people in need around her and Phoebe helped them.
Phoebe was a helper.
Four chapters ago Paul compared the church to a human body that had a bunch of different body parts that worked together. Every single person-part had something to do. Phoebe was one small part and her small function was to help people. That’s what she was suited to do, and she did exactly what she was good at.
By contrast Paul was obviously a point-of-the-spear guy. A key guy doing a big part that a key guy was suited for.
And Phoebe, doing her small part, helped him do his big.

Note: quotes from Romans 16:2 (NLT)

Week 43 Romans

The first eleven chapters of Romans were pretty theoretical, and I had trouble following some of Paul’s thinking.
But twelve-thirteen-fourteen-fifteen turn out to be pretty practical. Which isn’t the same as easy.
Chapter fourteen is one example of Paul recommending something pretty hands-on to the people in Rome.
His starting point is that everyone who believes in the Lord has some degree or level of faith. He calls it weaker-faith and stronger-faith (he doesn’t say it but I guess there are a lot more faith-strengths in-between). Since faith isn’t exactly the same strength in all of us an environment is created where we can start complaining and criticizing and arguing and pointing-fingers over our faith differences. Strong Faith hassles Weak Faith; Weak Faith gets self-defensive and yaps at Strong Faith. Like that.
Anyway the practical point Paul makes is that church wasn’t set up to be the place for sniping and badgering.
It’s natural for me to wonder: but what if the guy I’m criticizing is actually wrong?
Paul says that’s not your issue: each of us will have to give a personal account to God.
So I ask myself: then what am I supposed to do?
Paul says: don’t condemn each other anymore. Decide instead to live in such a way that you will not put an obstacle in another Christian’s path.
Which is pretty practical advice.
Even if it isn’t the same as easy.

Note: quotes from Romans 14:12-13 (NLT)

Week 43 Romans

Last December I decided to read the whole bible – OT & NT.
Lots of people prefer reading just the NT. Nothing much wrong with that.
But I spent last winter and spring in the OT and now that I’m reading Romans I’m glad I did. That NT-letter is OT-heavy.
I wondered how heavy so went back to do a quick survey of the first eleven chapters:
There are more than fifty OT quotations.
There are more than seventy references to OT law.
There are whole blocs of text written directly to Jewish people: 2:17-29, 3:1-20, chapter four is about Abraham, 5:12-21 (maybe), chapter seven is for people who know the OT law, most of nine-ten-eleven sound like they’re written to Jewish people.
Paul figures his readers know OT events and people: creation, Adam, Abraham, Sarah, Sodom-Gomorrah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Benjamin, Esau, the pharaoh, Moses, David, Isaiah, Hosea, Elijah & Mount Carmel are all named.
The point? Romans carries a lot of OT freight.
So if someone asked me what parts of Romans they could read that were pretty much OT-knowledge-free I would say only chapters five, six, and eight, plus bits-&-pieces. A person reading Romans is handicapped without any OT knowledge.

Personal note: Reading the OT helped me understand Romans better. How much better? A bit better – instead of being super-difficult to understand I’d rate Romans as just-plain-difficult. Added note: the numbers above are mine, meaning they’re pretty accurate but don’t take them to-the-bank.

Week 43 Romans

Because I’m a 21st-century Albertan I know I’m smarter than most 1st-century guys.
So a niggling question that occurs as I read Romans is how much of this letter did Paul’s not-too-bright audience understand (because halfway through it there’s quite a bit that I’m not getting)?
Here’s an example of one of Paul’s not-too-simple ideas. He’s talking about people who turn their back on the Lord’s truth. Paul says that even though they do: the truth about God is known to them instinctively. God has put this knowledge into their hearts.
Paul says there’s an instinctive, internal apprehension that people have about the Lord’s truth. Well yeah, you think…it’s easy enough to say that something that’s non-testable and invisible exists in my heart.
But Paul understands that. He goes on to say: from the time the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky and all that God made. They can clearly see his invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature. So Paul shifts from the airy-fairy instincts-of-the-heart to the actual tangible earth and sky. It sounds like Paul is saying that if you look at the rock-solid material world then those rock-solids can convey a couple of ideas about what the maker-of-rock-solids is like.
The material world is a kind of subtle Visiblizing Medium that tips me off about the invisible source it came from.

Note: quotes from Romans 1:19-20 (NLT)

Week 43 Romans

I’ve read the letter to the people in Rome before.
So reading it this time I’m getting that old familiar Paul-is-all-over-the-place feeling.
Partly it’s his writing style. But there’ve also been some weirdly complicated things going on since the arrival and departure of the Lord.
One pretty obvious one last week reading Acts was that the original Jewish followers of the Lord couldn’t really exclude non-Jewish people from believing, couldn’t post For-Jewish-People-Only signs on the front doors. But the problem with being inclusive was that things got a bit more complicated.
What was happening was that there were basically three categories of people who were coming to belief:
Ethnic-cultural-religious Jewish people;
Non-ethnic, non-cultural, non-Jewish but religiously interested people (people who hung-around the synagogues); and
Non-ethnic, non-cultural, non-Jewish, non-Jewish-religion people (a sort of peripheral-rabble).
Three groups: bluebloods, border-liners, outliers.
And in Romans Paul was writing to a church group that was a mash-up of all three.
The congregation was a bunch of racially, culturally, ethnically, linguistically, religiously, socially and economically uneasily-compatible people. Of course the biggest issue was the OT law, but there were other balls in the air too. Paul had his work cut out for him.

Added Note: I think one of the bible-reader’s temptations is to dumb things down. Dumbing-down can be a handy Complexity Management Tool. And it can be useful in getting through Romans. But dumbing-down Romans too much can also be not too smart.

Week 43 Romans

I just did a quick calculation: there’s about eleven weeks left in 2020 so I need to read two-chapters-a-day. Which seems pretty nice, except I’ve been through this stretch of NT letters before. Sure, there’s some highlight-reel content; but there’s also a few Heartbreak Hills ahead.
A couple of years ago I read a biography of Hannah More. She lived a couple of hundred years ago but what she said about English readers sounded pretty contemporary. People wanted short versions of longer books; condensations; abridgments where an editor grabbed only key passages, main ideas, and sound-bite quotes. The rule was to highlight the highlights; the lows stayed in the dark.
Anyway…someone deciding to read through the bible is going to get the better and the worse. That’s just part of the deal.
And that’s why there’s the temptation and – let’s face it – an obvious benefit in not reading through. And starting into Romans today I get a reminder of that right away.

Note: Here’s the exact quote from Karen Swallow Prior (and Prior quoting Hannah More) from Fierce Convictions (Nelson Books: Nashville, 2014): ‘In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many (people) read anthologies of excerpted works that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts…(Hannah) More cautioned against…cultivating a taste only for “delicious morsels,” one that spits out “every thing which is plain…In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling…” (23; I added the italics).

Week 43 Acts

I finished reading Acts today.
My quick summary? Acts is a) the story of Peter, and b) the story of Paul.
Luke – assuming Luke wrote Acts – had space limitations to think about. And I guess he decided Peter-Paul was all he had marquee space for.
But Acts isn’t a two-man show. I noticed that lots of other people are mentioned, and so I started tracking all the names I could find. Who I found was:
Joseph Barsabbas/Justus, Matthias, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, Nicholas, an Ethiopian official, Ananias, Tabitha/Dorcas, Simon the tanner, Agabus, Rhoda, Simeon/Niger, Lucius, Manaen, a lame man, Judas/Barsabbas, the Philippian jailer, Jason, Dionysius the Areopagite, Damaris, Aquila, Priscilla, Titius Justus, Crispus, Apollos the Alexandrian, Erastus, Tyrannus, Gaius, Aristarchus, Sopater, Secundus, Gaius, Tychicus, Trophimus, Eutychus, Philip’s four daughters, Mnason of Cyprus. Luke says nothing or almost nothing about any of these people.
He says very little about Philip, Stephen, Barnabas, Silas, or Timothy.
Nothing is said about almost all the disciples listed in chapter one.
The 3000 believers in chapter one? The 5000 in chapter four? No one even named.
I’m not criticizing Luke for choosing Peter & Paul. But I have to remember that once I get past the Big Two there’s still an awful lot going on in the early church. And it’s being done by an awful lot of people not named Peter or Paul.
So credit to a lot of unknown people.

Note: this name-list is an mhj product: pretty good, not perfect.

Week 42 Acts

The story of Paul’s Damascus Road meeting with the Lord is told three times in Acts.
I read the third one today, the second yesterday, the first the day before that. The three aren’t exactly the same.
One difference I noticed today was what the Lord said to Paul on the road. I likely noticed it because in my bible the Lord’s words are in red ink.
I didn’t have a bunch of comparison-time on my hands so I just did a word count:
Account #1: the Lord said thirty words to Paul.
Account #2: thirty-eight words.
Account #3: one-hundred and twenty-seven red-letter words.
So there’s some discrepancies.
Is that a problem? Is the author jerking us around, lying, misinformationing, contradicting himself, making it up? I guess you’d have to think on that.
Personally I figure it’s simpler, something like this:
My niece has a penguin stuffy: I tell her I went to the Calgary Zoo and saw penguins.
I meet a lion-tamer from a circus in Tanzania and try to build a bridge by saying: I went to the Calgary Zoo and saw lions.
My friend has a flamingo tattoo and I say: I went to the Calgary Zoo and saw fifty pink flamingos.
Am I deceiving anyone about what I saw at the zoo? Jerking anyone around?
No.
And I don’t guess Luke is either.

Note: the three accounts are in Acts 9:3-6, 22:6-11; 26:12-18 (NASB)