Medicine Hat Joe

Week 42 Acts

While the Lord was still on earth his disciples revered him as their sage, their master, their teacher. Every important decision ran through him.
But when the Lord left for good the disciples had to start figuring out some things for themselves.
One thing that was new was how they handled their money: all the believers met together constantly and shared everything they had. They sold their possessions and shared the proceeds with those in need.
Giving away all your money is pretty impressive.
Even more impressive is that I don’t get any sense of heavy-handed you-gotta-sell-all-your-possessions messaging. It sounds more like a spontaneous, voluntary, feeling-okay-about-it willingness: all the believers were of one heart and mind, and they felt that what they owned was not their own; they shared everything they had.
Ananias and Sapphira sold land and only gave a percentage of the money. The problem for them was that they publicized that they gave all of it. Peter told Ananias how stupidly unnecessary a lie that was because technically speaking Ananias could have kept it all for himself: the property was yours to sell or not sell, as you wished. And after selling it the money was yours to give away.
So I guess you could decide to give nothing at all.
Unless you really wanted to give, in which case the sky was the limit.

Note: quotes from Acts 2:44-45, 4:32, 5:4 (NLT)

Week 41 Acts

In Acts 3 Peter was instrumental in helping a man who had never walked walk. The man actually started jumping around in excitement, and witnesses were pretty impressed too.
Not so excited and not so impressed was a group of people that included: the leading priests, the captain of the Temple guard, and some of the Sadducees. They came and arrested Peter.
The miracle was what it was, but the leader’s big concern was who Peter attributed the miracle to. Peter told them the lame man: was healed in the name and power of Jesus Christ from Nazareth, the man you crucified, but whom God raised from the dead.
Then Peter said something extra about the Lord: there is salvation in no one else! There is no other name in all of heaven for people to call on to save them.
I’ve been reading through some of the Analects the last couple of weeks. They’re pretty good and they really make you think. And Confucius seems like a pretty good guy – smart, sincere, gentle, earnest, genuine, serious. He seems like a real character guy.
So this thing that Peter says about the Lord slows me down a bit.
It’d be different if Peter said that only a couple of dozen key people can save me. But he says only one can.

Note: quotes from Acts 4:1, 10, 12 (NLT)

Week 41 Acts

I took about eight weeks reading through the gospels (which means I dropped below my daily average and lost ground).
Funny thing is that even though I spent extra time on the gospels they’re still a bit of a blur. If someone asked me to give a brief gospel-synopsis I’d have to stop and think a bit.
So, fortunately for me there’s Acts 2.
Peter’s speaking to a crowd. The gist of his message takes up twenty-three verses. But right in the middle of it Peter says something that helps me with my summarize-the-gospel dilemma. He says to the crowd: people of Israel, listen! God publicly endorsed Jesus of Nazareth by doing wonderful miracles, wonders, and signs through him, as you well know. But you followed God’s prearranged plan. With the help of lawless Gentiles, you nailed him to the cross and murdered him. However, God released him from the horrors of death and raised him back to life again, for death could not keep him in its grip.
These three verses are a pretty fine Concise Gospel Story.
Jesus of Nazareth was an incontestable miracle-worker;
Powerful opponents engineered his death;
But that sad and ugly murder fitted into the bigger design of God;
Jesus came back to life;
Death lost its power.
Four gospels boiled down to about three dozen words.

Note: quote from Acts 2:22-24 (NLT)

Week 41 Acts

The first chapter of Acts is a quiet one. Peaceful. Calm. It’s an introduction to the book. And it builds a nice bridge from the gospel stories. Chapter one’s calm turns out to be a calm-before-the-storm kind of calm because chapter two just explodes: suddenly, there was a sound from heaven like the roaring of a mighty windstorm in the skies…Then, what looked like flames or tongues of fire appeared and settled on each of them. And everyone present was filled with the Holy Spirit and began speaking in other languages.
I heard a story an African guy told about how he’d travelled far from home to a place where people spoke another language. He wanted to tell those people the story of Jesus, and one day he was praying and begging the Lord to help him learn the language quickly. He was praying in his own language – obviously – and by the time he finished the prayer he realized he was praying in the language he didn’t know. The story seemed pretty wild, and I talked to the guy later in private. Apart from the fact that it was impossible to believe there was nothing loony or carnival about the guy, so that it all seemed plausible – in a impossible-barring-miracle way.
I thought about that guy today while I read Acts two with its unilingual-one-minute gathering interrupted by gale-force winds and fire the next. And then…bi-linguality.

Note: quote from Acts 2:2-4 (NLT)

Week 41 Acts

Some guy says to me: Okay I’m giving you five selections and they’re Matthew-Mark-Luke-John-Acts and you have to choose two of them, what are the two? Personally I think I’d be insane if Acts wasn’t one of them. I’d have to think about which gospel I’d take but Acts would be automatic. (My gospel pick would be either Luke or John – most likely Luke.)
Acts is a definite.
As far as that goes let’s say someone says: Pick three and only three NT books because that’s all you’ll have when I lock you up in an internment camp. I think I’d be partially-insane not to make Acts a pick. (I think my first two would be Luke & Acts, and then some undecided-right-now letter.)
Acts is gigantic.
It’s one of most interesting story-sets in the bible. Someone says to me: Okay pick the one book out of the whole bible that from top-to-bottom has the most interesting series of stories. I’d be semi-insane not to have Acts as part of that mix. (Genesis, the first half of Exodus, the Samuels, one of the gospels for sure, but Acts is right up there.)
One good reason for getting ahead in my bible-reading schedule is that I don’t have to rush through Acts.
Acts is one of the best.

Week 41 John

I finished reading John with the impression that belief was pretty important to him so ran some numbers to see.
I looked up Believe in a word book.
Matthew-Mark-Luke used the word a total of about eighteen times; John more than fifty. 18:50. A similar ratio showed up with other forms of the word:
Believed 5:22
Believes 2:14
Believing 1:5
Another impression I had – I can’t show this one numerically – is that John had a sort of Belief Continuum in mind. Not so much just two exclusive categories: Belief & Unbelief. More like a line stretching from Comprehensive Belief along through middle-stages and then on through uncertainty and all the way over to Complete Unbelief.
For example Martha in the Lazarus story is near the top-end of belief.
Nicodemus seems like a kind of middling guy who was belief-curious and who maybe in the end believed. The woman at the well spends some time in a belief-flux; ditto for the man born blind.
Judas is a sad and almost incomprehensible case of unbelief in-spite-of-everything-he-saw.
People move toward belief, away from belief, shifting one way or another.
Anyway at the end John spelled-out his aim. His gospel was written: so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing in him you will have life.
Which confirms my suspicion that belief is pretty important to John.

Note: quote from John 20:31 (NLT)

Week 41 John

I finished reading the gospel of John today.
I noticed that even at the end of the gospel, even after the Lord has come back from the dead and actually physically, visibly, materially appeared to the disciples that they’re still having trouble figuring things out.
I look back at the end of chapter sixteen. I remember it because the disciples seemed to have kind-of-arrived. The moment arrives right in the middle of that long it’s-time-for-me-to-leave conversation the Lord has with his eleven disciples. The talk – John thirteen-fourteen-fifteen-sixteen-seventeen – has roughly 110-verses of the Lord speaking. And he’s not telling bedtime-stories. It’s heavy going. Complex. Dense. Semi-penetrable. Puzzling. Intricate.
In spite of that there’s a point where the lights seem to go on for the disciples. They say to the Lord: at last you are speaking plainly and not in parables. Now we understand that you know everything and don’t need anyone to tell you anything. From this we believe that you came from God.
So in sixteen they’ve arrived. Now they know. Now they believe.
But then in chapters twenty-&-twenty-one it seems like they’re baffled. They seemed pretty sure, now they seem pretty unsure.
I think John is very interested in the progress of belief. And it looks like he’s also showing that the road to belief takes time. That there’s a bit-by-bit-ness to belief. That my two-steps-forward get intermittently stalled with my one-step-back.

Note: quote from John 16:29-30 (NLT)

Week 41 John

John sixteen starts with the Lord telling his disciples: I have told you these things so that you won’t fall away. Which is pretty interesting. The Lord is telling me stuff, and here he’s also telling me why he’s telling me.
Q: Why is he telling me? A: So that I won’t fall away.
But what exactly is he telling me? What are the These Things he’s talking about?
I glance back at the last chapter. I already read it, but I see now that I didn’t pick up on what the point was.
John fifteen says three big things.
For one thing the Lord said that his Spirit would be around to help me.
Reading back a bit farther the Lord said that if I was loyal to him it would end me up in conflict with the world – a kind of heads-up.
And back near the beginning of the chapter the Lord talked about being like a branch of a tree that will only stay alive as long as it’s attached to the tree.
John fifteen also says some small things.
Do they all relate to not falling away?
I dunno. I doubt it. But there’s something in there that I need to latch onto. A Fall-away Preventer.
What all is involved is a bigger exercise that’ll take more time.
For now I’m glad to know that the Lord doesn’t want me to fall away.

Note: quote from John 16:1 (NLT)

 

Week 40 John

It’s hard to say whether the resuscitation of Lazarus was the Lord’s most spectacular miracle. You’d think that if you had incontestable and stupendous power to act into the material world then any one normally impossible action wouldn’t really be superior to any other normally impossible action. But Lazarus’ return from the grave was pretty spectacular.
Which makes it easy to glide over the conversation the Lord had with Martha.
Martha told him she hoped to see her brother again, as she put it: in the resurrection on the last day. The kind of formal thing you might say at a funeral.
The Lord then said: I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die…will live again.
Then he put her on the spot by asking: do you believe this, Martha?
Do you believe this about me?
What do you believe about me?
Turns out Martha knew exactly what she believed:
yes Lord…I have always believed you are the Messiah,
the Son of God,
the one who has come into the world from God.
I’ve noticed that John is preoccupied with what looks like a kind of belief-spectrum. I’ve been tracking it – there’s examples of it in every chapter so far. He keeps coming back to people meeting the Lord and then moving up the scale or down.  Moving toward belief or moving away from belief.

Note: quotes from John 11:24-27 (NLT). Toward in 10:45; away from in 10:53.

Week 40

I was aiming to finish the gospel of John on September 30 but didn’t. I only got as far as the Lazarus story in chapter eleven.
It’s not like I needed to finish John today. It just seemed a bit tidier to me – an arriving-at-the-end-of-the-book at the same time as I arrived-at-the-end-of-the-month kind of thing.
If I had to blame anyone I’d blame John – he’s pretty demanding and he’s really slowed me down. Some days I’ve only read a chapter or two.
None of the gospels are exactly like reading the Medicine Hat News. They’re all doing some deep mining. But I think John drills down deepest of the four. So I’m taking some time, trying to make sense as I go, trying to fit pieces.
I think that lots of people figure the NT is an easier read than the OT. I don’t totally agree with that. There aren’t a lot of places in the NT where I can zoom along at highway speed. Reading the NT I’m feeling like the prairies are behind me now and I’m heading west into some mountain driving.
I looked at my numbers today. I need to read 1730 pages by December 31 and so far I’ve read 1492. The year is 75% gone; reading is 86.24% finished.
That seems good, and I feel like I’m in pretty good shape. But in a cautious not-counting-my-chickens sort of way.