Medicine Hat Joe

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)

Week 42 Acts

When does a commitment turn into a dilemma?
Maybe lots of times but the one I was thinking about was reading through the bible in a year.
A bible-reader’s Commitment is: keep turning the pages day-after-day.
A bible-reader’s Dilemma is: there’s no time to stop and think.
I thought about that after I read the story of the council meeting in Jerusalem. There was one big agenda item. Pretty much all the people who followed the Lord in the gospels were ethnic and religious Jews. Suddenly a bunch of people who weren’t Jewish want to follow the Lord too. So ethnic-religious Jews who followed the Lord told the guys who weren’t Jews ethnically, religiously or any other way that following the Lord included: a) repenting and believing in the Lord, and b) following a list of legal-cultural Jewish-isms.
The council’s question was: do they really have to?
The council’s resolution was basically, no, but there was a short list: you must abstain from eating food offered to idols, from consuming blood or eating the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality.
So…the Dilemma. I look at the list and ask myself is-that-it?
It seems like such a weird list and I wonder what to make of it.
But I’m reading-through, so I guess for now the question goes in the What-Do-I-Do-With-It? bin.
And I move on to chapter sixteen.

Note: quote from Acts 15:29 (NLT)

Week 42 Acts

Paul’s conversion to The Way was pretty dramatic, and one of the last things you’d have expected.
While he was on the way to Damascus Paul was stopped by a luminescence that blinded him, and a voice that asked him why he (Paul) was persecuting him (the voice). Paul didn’t know what was going on.
Paul: who are you, sir?
The Voice: I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting.
That was the extent of the conversation.
Paul had to be led by the hand into Damascus. He sat in his room for three blind and hungry days. He did pray, and he did have a vision of someone named Ananias coming and healing his blindness.
In the meantime Ananias had his own independent & simultaneous vision where he was told to go to the house of a stranger named Judas who lived on Straight Street where he would find Paul. He would pray that Paul would regain his vision.
Ananias was about as willingly to see Paul as Jonah was the Assyrians. But the Lord told him: (Paul) is my chosen instrument to take my message to the Gentiles and to kings as well as to the people of Israel. And I will show him how much he must suffer for me.
So Ananias did as he was told.
Once you get to chapter thirteen Paul dominates the rest of the book of Acts.

Note: quotes from Acts 9:5 & 15-16 (NLT)

Week 42 Acts

If I compiled a Top Ten List of Stories in Acts then Peter-in-prison is likely on it.
There’s a couple of things to think about in the story.
First of all a man named James is executed. But Peter escapes. So I wonder why the one guy dies and the other is saved. I realize there’s not much point in wondering why because I don’t and won’t know. Still…I wonder.
Secondly is that Peter’s there in prison. Then an angel appears, tells him to get dressed, releases his chains, and leads him out. While this is happening Peter: thought it was a vision. He didn’t realize it was really happening. He knew something was happening but didn’t think it was a real something – more like a dream-sequence, wish-fulfillment, an abstraction or fantasy. Finally, alone on the dark street he figured it felt too real to be fake.
Third thing is his friends. While Peter was in prison: the church prayed very earnestly for him. I don’t know what they were praying because when Peter walked to Mary’s house a servant answered the door and saw Peter, ran back and told the people, and then they told her: you’re out of your mind. Then on second-thought they decided: it must be his angel.
The story is perplexing, incredible, reassuring; a story of lower-real meeting upper-real.
A great story.

Note: quotes from Acts 12:9, 5, 15 (NLT)

Week 42 Acts

The Cornelius story is one of the big stories in Acts. I didn’t run a word-count on it, but if it isn’t the longest it’s nearly.
And it’s one of the turning-point stories in the bible. The OT story is about the Abraham-Isaac-Jacob-Israel-Hebrew-Jewish people group. They score a ten on the OT-Priority-Rating.
Lots of other tribal-ethnic-cultural-national groups show up too. Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Ethiopia, Libya, the Hittites, Philistines, Canaanites. But they’re only scoring ones or twos.
The Israel Group was super-important. Select. Unique. Special. Distinct. As if all the other nationalities were carrying a deadly virus that Israel didn’t want to catch, so Keep Your Distance!
The Cornelius story is a step on the road to revising that sense of Us vs. Them.
Cornelius was: a devout man who feared the God of Israel…He gave generously to charity and was a man who prayed regularly to God. In spite of that, Cornelius was a Them.
So under normal circumstances Peter would never, ever, ever have fraternized with non-Jewish Cornelius. It took a miraculous vision-driven intervention to push Peter through his ethnic quicksand.
Peter had already seen the Lord show an international open-mindedness – there was the Roman centurion, the Samaritan women, the Syro-Phoenecian woman. But it’s only now that Peter is latching onto the fact that ethic and racial differences aren’t as important as he thought.

Note: quote from Acts 10:2 (NLT)