The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog

We follow the New Testament from the preaching of John the Baptist through the 70 weeks from the baptism of Jesus until the baptism of the disciples with the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.

June 14, 27 A.D.  A Demon in the Congregation #38

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , , , , ,

Week 18 ———  A Demon in the Congregation
Mark 1:21-28  Luke 4:31-37

Today, in 27 AD, Jesus is still on his three-week tour of Galilee without his disciples. Since we have no stories of this time, I will back up to discuss what happened on that Sabbath in Capernaum (the day before he left on the trip).

Picture it.  It is Saturday morning in Capernaum.  Jesus is teaching in the synagogue.  Luke says, “They were astonished at his teaching, for his word possessed authority.” Things are going so much better for Jesus here than in Nazareth.  As the people sit and intently listen, Jesus suddenly gets heckled.  Like the drunk guy who interrupts the act in a comedy club,  a man yells: “Leave us alone!”  Let’s read the scripture:

Luke 4:31-34  And he went down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee. And he was teaching them on the Sabbath, and they were astonished at his teaching, for his word possessed authority.   And in the synagogue, there was a man who had the spirit of an unclean demon, and he cried out with a loud voice,   “Ha!  What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.”

Now I am thinking, ‘What is a demon-possessed man doing in the worship service?’  But Jesus does not seem to be surprised.

Luke 4:35-37   But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent and come out of him!” And when the demon had thrown him down in their midst, he came out of him, having done him no harm. And they were all amazed and said to one another, “What is this word? For with authority and power, he commands the unclean spirits, and they come out!” And reports about him went out into every place in the surrounding region.

Luke 4:40-41   Now, when the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various diseases brought them to him, and he laid his hands on every one of them and healed them. And demons also came out of many, crying, “You are the Son of God!” But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak because they knew that he was the Christ.

Mark 1:39    And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.

I am usually hesitant to talk about demons and Jesus casting them out.  I am not an expert on that subject. I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church, and no one ever talked about that.  But you can’t read the New Testament and ignore that Jesus did a lot of “casting out demons” and led his disciples to do the same.  We have so many misconceptions about demons from our tradition, from poor translations, and from all the supernatural stuff in movies, TV, etc. — so many misconceptions that it is complicated to talk about.  You have some people who believe that the talk of demon possession in the New Testament is only their first-century way to describe seizures, psychoses, or other disorders that we modern, informed intellectual people would describe as mental illness or medical disease.  There seem to be two groups of people.  One would attribute everything that goes wrong in the world to “the devil and his demons,” and another that denies the existence of evil spiritual beings.

It would be easier for me to skip this subject. But if I am covering Jesus’ 70-week ministry day by day. I can’t skip over every instance of him casting out demons because it is a big part of his ministry.

My question is, “Do you believe the Bible is true?”  If you say the Bible is true, then you are forced to believe in spiritual beings that we cannot see, for they are plainly discussed throughout the scriptures.  Michael Heiser gives a good overview of this in his book Supernatural, a shorter, simpler version of his book The Unseen Realm.  My thoughts here lean heavily on Heiser’s books, for that is where I learned to appreciate  (and gain at least a little understanding of) the vast discussion of the spiritual realm in the text of the Bible.  Before discussing the concept of Jesus casting out demons, we need at least some basic awareness of the spiritual forces at work in our world.  That is the focus for today.  Later, we will expand this discussion to what Jesus did in the synagogue in Capernaum that day and throughout his ministry.

In the beginning, there was God.  Yehovah.  There is one God who is the creator of everything. But other spiritual beings were created by God and are in place when man is created. God has a heavenly council of spiritual beings with whom he discusses his plans and often assists God in carrying out his will. These beings are frequently referred to as the heavenly host, gods, or “sons of god.”  The council is seen in Psalm 82.

Psalm 82:1-2    God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods, he holds judgment: “How long will you judge unjustly and show partiality to the wicked?

Does that mention of “in the midst of the gods” bother you?  It sure used to bother me.  If the Bible teaches there is only one God, where did these others come from?  It is the Hebrew elohim, here translated as ‘gods,’ but don’t get hung up on that because that word“refers to any inhabitant of the spiritual world.”1  So Yehovah is elohim, as are demons and the human dead in the afterlife because they are all inhabitants of the spiritual world.    When our translators choose the word ‘god’ to translate ‘elohim,’ we can be confused, thinking the Bible is talking about other beings similar to Yehovah.  Certainly, that is not true.  The Bible is consistent in noting the uniqueness and superiority of Yehovah:

1 Kings 8:23   O Yehovah, God [elohim] of Israel, there is no god [elohim- spiritualbeing] like you.

Psalm 97:9   For you, Yehovah, are most high over all the earth;  you are exalted far above all gods [elohim- spiritualbeings].  

These spiritual beings were created to dwell with Yehovah and to be a heavenly council. 

We see them in the scripture doing 2 basic things: 1. to take part in decisions and 2. to be his task force to accomplish certain things. (When they are in the job of messengers, we see them called ‘angels’ for ‘angel’ is the English derivative of the Greek ‘aggelos’ and Hebrew ‘malach’, both words which mean ‘messenger.’ )  In 1 Kings 22, Yehovah has decided that the wicked king, Ahab, has to go.  In the meeting of the divine council, Yehovah lets the council decide how Ahab will meet his end.  They also assist in the judgment of King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon (Daniel 4).  [Read the chapters listed.  Both of these decisions end in very creative punishment.]  Heiser says, “God doesn’t need a divine council, but he chooses to use one.” In the same way, Yehovah does not need humans to help him in his work, but he chooses to work with us.  He didn’t have to have Moses raise his staff to part the sea or have the people march around Jericho to make the walls fall.  He can do anything without us.  But God chooses to live in community with us.  He wants us to work with him in his kingdom. He chooses family.  

In the beginning, it wasn’t just God and Adam and Eve in the garden.  Yehovah’s heavenly family was there also.  The garden was designed to be where all of God’s family could live together.  And Yehovah wants so much for all of his family to be together.  It is like a mother’s joy when all her children are back in the house together.  But one of God’s heavenly beings decided to rebel.  The accuser, the satan, a heavenly being, rebelled against Yehovah and convinced the humans to rebel also.  When sin and rebellion came, the garden in Eden was shut down, and God could no longer dwell with his earthly family.  The rest of the Bible after Genesis 3 is the story of God’s plan to reunite his family all in the same place.

I had been taught that before humanity was created, there was a great rebellion, and 1/3 of the heavenly beings were cast out.  This is based on Revelation 12:7-9, but that passage is associated with the birth of the Messiah. This rebellion in Genesis 3 is the first of three rebellions by heavenly beings.    When the satan rebelled, he was expelled from God’s presence and “thrown down to the ground” (Isaiah 14:12).  The earth now is a place of death (introduced by sin) and is no longer fit to be a place for God and his heavenly beings.  The satan becomes the ruler over the place of death and over all who die.   And things on earth go from bad to worse.

After the satan and the humans are cast out of God’s space, evil multiplies to the point that Genesis 6:5 tells us:   “Yehovah saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”  Also, in Genesis 6, in this setting of man’s horrible dive into wickedness, the second rebellion of the heavenly beings happens.  There we have that story of “the sons of God” fathering earthly children, whom the Bible calls the Nephilim.  Genesis 6:4 tells us the “Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward,” and calls them “mighty men.”  They were giants, fierce warriors, and they were evil.  You must refer to the New Testament for further information(2 Peter 2:4-6 and Jude 6.)   Peter and Jude both share information from the book of 1 Enoch, which, though not considered scripture, was deemed worthy of quoting in scripture. (This book teaches that demons are the unembodied spirits of the Nephilim who perished in and after the flood.)  These rebellious heavenly “sons of God” were sent to hell to be judged later.  We will see more of the Nephilim later.

God commanded humans to “be fruitful and multiply” to spread his kingdom throughout the earth.  But they don’t want to disperse and so they build a tower in Babylon.  This displeases Yehovah, so he meets with his heavenly council and says, “ Come, let us go down and there confuse their language so that they may not understand one another’s speech” (Genesis 11:7).  We all know this part of the story that tells how the nations listed in Genesis 10 came to be.  However, many of us have never noticed Moses’ comments on the Tower of Babel story in Deuteronomy.

“Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations;  ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you.  When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.  But Yehovah’s portion is his people,  Jacob his allotted heritage.  (Deuteronomy 32:7-9)

God divided the people into nations, assigned to be under members of his heavenly council (the “sons of God”).  There are 70 nations mentioned in this part of Genesis.   The nation God left for himself was Jacob (Israel). That is why the next thing in Genesis is God calling Abraham.  But God did not abandon the other nations.  He planned to make of his people, Israel, a kingdom of priests to carry his message to the world.  Through his people, through Abraham, Yehovah planned to bless the nations.  But these members of the heavenly council took advantage of these nations.  They managed the nations unjustly and demanded to be worshiped.  So, the other nations began to worship these members of God’s council instead of Yehovah, God himself. This is the Third Rebellion of God’s Spiritual Beings.

So, back to Psalm 82, where we see Yehovah  judging them:

Psa. 82:1    God has taken his place in the divine council;
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:
“How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked? Selah
Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
Rescue the weak and the needy;
deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”
They have neither knowledge nor understanding,
they walk about in darkness;
all the foundations of the earth are shaken.
I said, “You are gods,
sons of the Most High, all of you;
nevertheless, like men you shall die,
and fall like any prince.”
Arise, O God, judge the earth;
for you shall inherit all the nations!

Yehovah says to the divine council in Psalm 81:6, “You are elohim, sons of the Most High, all of you.”   They are his sons; he created them to be family, just as he created us to be part of his family.  They were created to assist him in ruling over creation, much like we were created to have dominion over the earth.  But something went wrong.  They did not follow Yehovah’s method of dealing justly with the nations.  They were supposed to shepherd the nations and teach them the ways of Yehovah, but instead, the people learned nothing.  They were left in the darkness instead of leading them back to Yehovah.  The spiritual beings demanded to be worshipped instead of Yehovah.  So verse 7 tells us, “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you; nevertheless, like men you shall die, and fall like any prince.”  This council is being judged and found guilty, and the wages for their crimes is the loss of their immortality; they will die like humans. And Yehovah will inherit all the nations.

Now, back to those Nephilim.   The Nephilim who died became demons.  But many lived on the earth and reproduced and carried this bloodline through the time of David.  We see them in Numbers 13:33 when the children of Israel were at the edge of the promised land, and they sent spies to the land. In the report of the spies sent in to scout out the land of Canaan:  “And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”  

Their fear of these giants is greater than their faith in Yehovah’s promises to conquer the land for them. They choose not to enter the land, so all of these adults (other than Joshua and Caleb) die.

But their children are given another chance.  Just before entering the land 40 years later, God directed them to go against the armies of Sihon and Og, the king of Bashan.  The Bible tells us these two Amorite kings were rulers of the Rephaim3 (Deuteronomy 2).  This time, instead of running scared, they face and eliminate the descendants of the Nephilim.  They continue to encounter these giants, and you see that this conquest of Canaan is a spiritual battle as well as a physical battle, and you begin to understand why God insisted some cities be destroyed entirely and everyone killed.  The bloodline of the Nephilim was demonic and needed to be destroyed to stop their influence in the land.  But they were not completely successful.  Joshua 11:21-22 tells us, 

Joshua 11:21-22   “ And Joshua came at that time and cut off the Anakim from the hill country, from Hebron, from Debir, from Anab, and from all the hill country of Judah, and from all the hill country of Israel. Joshua devoted them to destruction with their cities. There was none of the Anakim left in the land of the people of Israel. Only in Gaza, in Gath, and in Ashdod did some remain. 

Unfortunately, the few descendants of the Nephilim that remained continued to cause trouble for Israel.  We know that Gath becomes a Philistine city. You know the name of one of the Rephaim from Gath.  He was defeated by the shepherd boy David.  (Gath was the hometown of Goliath and other Anakim.)

Once again, Yehovah desires to reunite us all, as it was in Eden.  God’s plan at the Tower of Babel to start over with the nation he would build from Abraham does not bear fruit because, again, humans are disobedient and faithless.  There were some excellent leaders of the people of Israel, but even the best of them, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, and David, were sinners and disobedient to God’s plan.  So God’s nation, Israel, fails to be what God wanted them to be.   But God has not given up on humankind.  He still wants to redeem us and live together with us in a new Eden.  Heiser says: 

“Humanity could not be trusted with reviving the Edenic kingdom rule.  Only God himself could do what needed to be done.  Only God could meet the obligations of his own covenants.  But humanity would not be set aside.  Instead, God would have to become man.  Instead, God would have to fulfill the Law and the covenants himself and then take upon himself the penalty for all human failure.” 2 

So God has a plan for Jesus to be the one who could live a life without sin and remove the curse of death. Have you ever wondered why God’s plan for Jesus to die for sins and to remove the curse of death is not simply described in the Old Testament?   Scattered prophecies hint at this, but why didn’t God spell it out plainly?”  Why didn’t God say, “Hey, in a few hundred years, I’m going to send Jesus to be the Messiah and die on the cross for the sins of mankind”?   Instead, we have all of Isaiah’s prophecies of the suffering servant, but nowhere in Isaiah’s prophesies is the word ‘messiah’ found.   It is almost like God wanted to keep this plan a secret that could only be seen after it happened.

And that is the point.  God did want to keep it a secret.  Jesus was to come and live a sinless life and be an innocent man crucified by the forces of darkness and then resurrected.  But if the forces of darkness, the satan, and the demons (the fallen former council members) knew God’s plan, then they wouldn’t fall for it.

That is how Paul understood it:

1 Corinthians 2:7-8   But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Near the end, when Jesus tells his disciples he must suffer and die, You don’t hear them say, “Well, of course, you are… that is just what we read in the scriptures.”  No!  Peter basically tells Jesus that it is a dumb plan.  Those Old Testament scriptures that we now, looking backward, see so easily were predicting Jesus’ death and resurrection, which were almost impossible to know before it happened.  Even after the resurrection, the disciples need supernatural help to understand what happened:  

Luke 24:44-45   Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.”  Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.”

These evil beings used to be in God’s council.  They are intelligent; they know the scriptures.  But they are not all-knowing.  They recognized that Jesus came as the prophesied son of David to be the Messiah.  You see these demons over and over shout it out, “You are the holy one of God” You are the son of God.”  And so they know they have to do something to stop him.  So they arranged to have him betrayed and crucified.  And when he died and was buried, they thought they had won.  Imagine their surprise when Jesus shows up in the place of the dead and lets them know he is just there for a few days because he is being resurrected.

Jesus defeats the curse of death.  Our debt of sin is paid in full.  Death no longer has any hold on us.  The satan, the lord of death, and his demons no longer have any hold on us.  God’s kingdom is being rebuilt, one believer at a time.  God is redeeming us so that we can again live with him.

Following Jesus’ ascension, Pentecost comes. Pentecost is the grand reversal of what happened at the Tower of Babel.  At Babel, God divided the people into nations with different languages and gave each nation to his heavenly council to reign while he chose one nation to rule himself.  At Pentecost, God brings all these nations together:

Acts 2:5  Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.

It is not a coincidence that the nations listed in Acts 2 are the same nations listed in Genesis 10.  While at Babel, the nations were divided because they couldn’t understand each other’s language, at Pentecost, every nation can now understand the disciples, and God reunites the nations under Him.  About 3000 are saved. These new believers in Jesus will leave Jerusalem and return to their home countries to spread God’s message.   The kingdom is expanding, and the nations are being redeemed.

God’s message will be spread.  His will will be done.  The battle is over, and the forces of darkness have already lost.  If you are in Christ, the satan has no hold on you. He is lord of the dead, and death has been defeated in Christ.  The demons have no hold on you.  You are no longer part of their kingdom when you join the Kingdom of God.  Jesus will come again and fully restore God’s kingdom.  As Peter says, we will be promoted to heavenly status, “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). The Bible refers to it as ‘glorification.’  We will be as God created Adam and Eve to be: immortal, glorified images of God, dwelling in the presence of God.

But until then, we must see the world as Paul did: Our struggle in this world is not against people but against the spiritual forces of evil.  

Eph. 6:10-13   Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.  Put on the whole armor of God so that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm.

In the past few weeks, we have talked about discipleship as apprenticeship, about how we need to spend time with Jesus so that we can imitate him.  I shared Romans 8:29, which said God had destined us from the beginning of time to be conformed to the image of his Son.  This is something God will accomplish.  I don’t want you to feel guilty about those areas of your life where you are not like Jesus.  Being like Jesus is not a task you do, so God will not be angry with you.  Guilt is not the attitude you should have.   Instead, this is the attitude I want you to have:   Gratitude.  

Be grateful that our God Himself is looking forward to the day He will bring about our glorification.  When he will transform us, when we replace this perishable body with the imperishable, when we put on immortality and become partakers in the divine nature, when “we shall be like him.”   Meanwhile, we live in such a way that the people around us, who have been ensnared by the trap of the devil, will want to join us in the family of God

  1. Heiser, Michael. Supernatural. Kindle edition, page 18.
  2. You will see these descendants of the Nephalim in the Old Testament called ‘The Anakim’ (the giant descendants of Anak), or the Rephaim (which is Hebrew for “lofty terrible ones”).
  3. Ibid. page 96.

June 15-16, 27 A.D.  Jesus Up Before the Dawn #37

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog ,

Week 18 ———  Jesus is Up Before the Dawn
Mark 1:32-39

Last week, we talked about Jesus’ encounter with the four fishermen.  The next day was the Sabbath in Capernaum. Then, on Sunday morning, he left on a three-week journey to the towns of Galilee. I’d love to tell you some stories from that 3-week trip, but I can’t.  I can’t because the Bible has no details about that trip.  So, while Jesus travels around Galilee until July 7, I have time to back up and talk about what happened a week ago,  June 15-16, 27 AD.

Mark 1:32-34       That evening at sundown they brought to him all who were sick or oppressed by demons. And the whole city was gathered together at the door.  And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons. And he would not permit the demons to speak because they knew him. 

That Sabbath in Capernaum was a busy day for Jesus.  After he heals a demon-possessed man in the synagogue, he leaves the service and heals Peter’s mother-in-law. After sundown, everyone in the town who had acquaintances who needed healing brought them to Jesus, and Mark tells us, “The whole city was gathered together at the door.”  It was probably a very long night.  Then Mark picks up the following day:

Mark 1:35-39       And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed. And Simon and those who were with him searched for him, and they found him and said to him, “Everyone is looking for you.” And he said to them, “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I came out.”  And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.

Have you ever had one of those days that seemed never to end?  There have been a few days in my medical practice where I felt like the whole city had been at the door.  They may all have the same number of hours, but some days are longer than others.  Just a few days ago, Friday, June 21, was the “longest day” of 2024, the summer solstice, when we have more hours of daylight than any other day this year.  But we have all had days that seemed to last forever and some we never wanted to end.  What do you want to do after a long, hard day?  If at all possible, you want to sleep late, right?

So what does Jesus do after healing that lasted long into the night?   Mark says, “And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.”   What woke Jesus up so early?  Jesus got up before the sun so the daylight didn’t wake him.  He didn’t set an alarm clock.  Why did he wake up so early after a long day?  I am guessing God woke him up.  Does God ever wake you up early?

Back in March, we discussed what Jesus did during the 40 days in the wilderness, and we talked a little about the prayer life of a first-century Jew.   (See “https://swallownocamels.com/2024/03/09/february-16-march-27-27-a-d-jesus-in-the-wilderness-the-year-of-the-lords-favor-16/“)  There were set times for prayer, at least at “evening, morning and noon” as David mentions in Psalm 55:17.  We know Daniel had a habit of praying three times a day, despite the threat of the lions’ den (Daniel 6:10).  And there were at least two set prayers, the Shema and the Amidah. (The text of these prayers is included in the link above.)   We know the early Christian Church prayed the Lord’s Prayer three times a day.  Traditions today vary widely. The Eastern Orthodox Christian Church has adopted breviaries (liturgical prayer books), and church bells ring seven times daily to announce their prayer times. Then you have the Protestant churches in the US, many of which have no set times of prayer.

Many other religions have set prayer times. Most of us who have traveled have heard the call to prayer coming from the minaret of a mosque. Five times a day, it rings out (dawn, early afternoon, late afternoon, after sunset, and nighttime), and the prayers are recited worldwide, facing toward the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia.  

Should we have a set time to pray?   I grew up in the church, but no one ever told me I needed to set specific times aside for prayer and that I needed to pray specific prayers.  Is there a command in scripture to stop praying three times a day?  (I can’t find it.)   I once had a Sunday School teacher speak on why we shouldn’t regularly say the same prayer over again.  (He had gotten upset because someone read a printed prayer during the worship service.)  He used Matthew 6:7 as his verse to teach that.  From the KJV:  “But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye, therefore, like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him.”  He interpreted that as saying we shouldn’t use pre-written prayers like those heathen do.  Those are just “vain repetitions.”  The KJV is not wrong here, but this teacher misunderstood.   To repeat something in vain is to say something without meaning.   The “vain repetition” (or, as the ESV calls them, “empty phrases”) Jesus is talking about is the common practice of the pagans of saying the exact phrases over and over because they thought that if you said this particular phrase so many times, you would force the reluctant god to fulfill your request, almost like saying magic words.  Jesus certainly does not speak against saying prescribed prayers, for the next thing he says is to “pray like this” and gives us a prescribed prayer we call the Lord’s Prayer.  It is crucial to guard against the concept of ‘vain repetitions.’ Every time we recite the words of the Lord’s prayer (or any prayer) without heartfelt meaning, we risk repeating them in vain. Our prayers don’t need fancy wording, but they must be honest, from the heart.

Should we pray like Jesus 3 regular times a day?  There is something to be said for having a regular rhythm of prayer in your day.  Perhaps we, as apprentices of Jesus, also need to imitate him in this.  Maybe it is time to live every day in a rhythm of prayer.  In the morning, sometime in the mid-day, and in the evening, set aside a few minutes to pray every day.  Why don’t we do this?   We feel like we are so busy.  There is so much to do each day.  But look at Jesus.  Jesus only has ten months left to do what he was sent here to do before his crucifixion.  He doesn’t have time to waste. That is all the time he has to choose disciples, teach them, show them how to live life and correct their misunderstandings.  He has to train them before he sends them out to change the world with the Gospel.  He spent the first 40 days after his baptism in the wilderness. That is nearly a tenth of the time of his entire ministry.  We think of the time in the wilderness as ‘when he was tested by the satan.’  But the time in the wilderness was his time with the Father and the Holy Spirit with no interruptions.  A time of preparation so that he would be able to do his ministry.  And then, throughout his brief time here, he goes off many times by himself.  Pay attention as you read the Gospels. Jesus is constantly going off by himself to pray.  Because he knew he needed to.

Jesus only had ten months to do what he had been sent here to do before his crucifixion.  He doesn’t have time to waste. He only has 438 days from his baptism to his crucifixion.  That is all the time he has to choose disciples, teach them, show them how to live life and correct their misunderstandings.  He has to train them before he sends them out to change the world with the Gospel.  He spent the first 40 days after his baptisms in the wilderness. That is nearly a tenth of the time of his entire ministry.  We think of the time in the wilderness as ‘when he was tested by the satan.’  But the time in the wilderness was his time with the Father and the Holy Spirit with no interruptions so that he would be able to do his ministry.  And then, throughout his brief time here, he goes off many times by himself because he needed to.  

Once Jesus’ ministry gets going and people find out he is healing, casting out demons, and performing miracles, he is constantly being sought by the crowds. He could have set up a full calendar of speaking engagements at any synagogue in Galilee.  And the healing.  You realize that there were almost no cures for anything in the first century.  The field of medicine was pitiful at best.   So, if you had a disease, you had little hope for healing unless you found a miracle.   If you heard about a healer, you would travel far just for a chance to be healed. That’s why the whole town was at his door.

Yet, with all these crowds pressing in, Jesus made time to pray alone.  The busier Jesus got, the more he went off alone and prayed.  In our passage today, Jesus is tired and exhausted, but he needs to be connected to the Father.  Look back at the passage.  Jesus gets up before dawn to spend time alone with the Father.  Simon is busy searching for Jesus because the town is full of people who are looking for him.  There are more that want his touch.  Simon tells Jesus that there is a great ministry opportunity here.  But Jesus tells Simon that he needs to go to other towns in Galilee, and he invites Simon to go with him.  “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also, for that is why I have come.”   Again, the reason we don’t have any stories from these three weeks of Jesus’ ministry is that his disciples didn’t go with him.  They weren’t ready for a full-time commitment yet.  They stay home and fish while Jesus goes on this quick tour of Galilee.  So all we know about this trip is this one sentence: ” And he went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.

The people in Capernaum are all pro-Jesus here.  (This is a significant change from his reception in Nazareth.)  Jesus has gone viral in Capernaum.  It would have been easy for Jesus to stay there.   But Jesus was fine saying ‘no’ to Simon, saying ‘no’ to the crowd in Capernaum if it meant saying ‘yes’ to the Father.  There are so many good things we can do in God’s world.  There are so many ministries we could help out.  We could try to help all of them and end up just pulling ourselves in so many directions, getting nothing done.  We could do many good things but miss the great things God wanted us to do.  John D. Rockefeller is quoted as saying, “Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.”  If you say ‘yes’ to doing one thing, you say ‘no’ to many others.  To choose the best thing, the great thing, you must say no to some good things.

Jesus could have done many good things if he stayed in Capernaum.  But they weren’t the things God had for him to do. We have to discern what the great thing God wants us to do is.  Jesus was doing that before dawn in Mark 1— praying to determine God’s best.  And that is the root of prayer. 

In Jesus’ Bible, in Hebrew the most common word for prayer is ‘tefillah’ coming from the root word ‘palal’ as seen in I Kings 8:28:  “Yet have regard to the ‘tefillah’ (prayer) of your servant and to his plea, O LORD my God, listening to the cry and to the “tefillah” (prayer) that your servant ‘palal’ (prays) before you this day,  

The root meaning behind palal is “fall down to the ground in the presence of one in authority to plead a cause or seek a judgment or discernment.”   It is the picture of someone falling on their knees before a king or judge, begging for something.  That is not a familiar picture to those who live in the US, but I have a very clear picture of ‘palal’ in my mind.  

I was working in the mission hospital in Ghana during a malaria epidemic.  Our 36-bed pediatric ward was overflowing with 54 patients, many of whom were near death.  I came to the bedside of a very ill 6-year-old little girl who was hanging on to life by a thread.  The malaria parasite had infected her brain.  Her father fell on his knees before me and begged for us to do anything to save his daughter’s life.  I was shocked and overwhelmed by his actions.  I did the only thing I knew to do.  I went down on my knees with him to appeal to the authority who could actually heal his little girl.  I told him through the translator that we were doing all we could with medicine to treat his girl but that I would join him in praying to God, who could do what we couldn’t do.  So we knelt there on that wood floor beside her bed.  Her father, me, the translator, and all the nurses in the room joined together to fall down before the creator of the universe, the great physician and pled for the life of this little girl.  The next day, she began to improve, and a few days later, this father carried his daughter back to their village, leaving with not only a daughter who was whole but a knowledge of a God who can do what man cannot.   I wish I could tell you that all of the children got better.  But many did not.  Many fathers carried their children back to their village to bury them there.

But this man on his knees, seeking one with the power to fill his request— that is palal.  That is the root of prayer.  Again, it is to “fall down to the ground in the presence of one in authority to plead a cause or seek a judgment or discernment.”  Jesus is up before dawn in our passage today to seek from the authority of the universe a discernment.  Should he stay in Capernaum or go elsewhere?  He can do good wherever he goes, but Jesus has limited time.  He wants to do not what is just good but what is God’s best.  We need to pray more prayers of discernment.  We come to Yehovah for His discernment over our lives. 

Proverbs 3:5-6    Trust in Yehovah with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.

We know it is not smart to “lean on our own understanding,” but often, we try to decide what is best without seeking the one who knows.  Jewish scholars say prayer is “the soul’s yearning to define what truly matters and to ignore the trivialities that often masquerade as essential.”   That is a haunting phrase, “trivialities that often masquerade as essential.”  Jesus’ time was limited; he had little time for trivialities.  How about us?  Sometimes, we live each day like we have all the time in the world, but our time in this life is also limited.  How good are you at ignoring the trivialities to do what matters?

Trivialities —  I will mention just a couple of examples.  Your trivialities may vary.  
According to a survey conducted in February 2021, 48% of the respondents stated that, on average, they spent five to six hours on their phones daily (not including work-related smartphone use). 22% said they spent three to four hours on their phones daily. Only five percent of users surveyed said they spent less than an hour on their smartphones daily. Have you heard the term ‘doomscrolling’? It refers to spending excessive amounts of time reading large quantities of news online or viewing multiple videos or posts without knowing how much time has passed.   A similar study showed that most Americans watched 3-4 hours of television daily.  And sometimes we say to ourselves, “I wish I had more time to visit with our neighbors, read a book, study the Bible, pray, etc.”  The time is there.  We must be better at discerning how to use it for great things.

God created life with a rhythm.  He established it at the beginning of Genesis.  The years are broken up by appointed times when you stop what you do daily and dedicate time to God.  The weeks are broken up by the Sabbath, a day set aside to stop what you are doing, rest, and seek God.  The days are broken up by times of prayer.  God set up this rhythm to our years, weeks, and days for all the saints in the Bible, Old, and New Testament.  The creator of the universe set it up this way because He knew we needed it.    We were not designed to be continuously busy.  It is not healthy physically or spiritually.  But we live in a busy world.

You understand busy if you have ever walked on New York City streets.  There are things I like about NYC, but the crowds, traffic, and street chaos are not on my list.  The best pictures of NYC are from far above, where you can’t see the people or the cars, just the buildings.  In the mid-1800s, New York City’s population grew exponentially due to a large influx of immigrants, and living conditions became more crowded and unhealthy.   The City’s politicians and planners felt that more open space was needed for the health of the residents.  In 1853, state officials approved funds to purchase the land from 59th to 106th Streets, between Fifth and Eighth Avenues.  So they created Central Park—over 800 acres with artificial lakes, waterfalls, meadows, and wooded areas. It is a respite from the hurry, a place to get away from the craziness of the city. Many New Yorkers say a walk in Central Park maintains their sanity.  Even the New York politicians recognized that amid this craziness, we need space away from the crowds.

As we walk in the footsteps of Jesus, as we apprentice under him, we are called to imitate his actions. One of these actions is taking time for solitude. Just as Jesus sought time alone with his Father, we too should seek moments of quiet reflection and connection with God.   Jesus calls us to slow down, simplify our lives, and be apprentices. We have to be with him, observe what he does, and then do what he does. The trouble is that most of us are too busy to find the time to be with Jesus. Dallas Willard called hurry the great enemy of the spiritual life. He said we must “ruthlessly eliminate hurry from our lives.”  We must learn to live in the spiritual rhythm God designed us for.  We need to take the time to be with Jesus.  Maybe for you, it is in the morning before the dawn.  Perhaps some other time works for you.  But it must be some time. We must learn to say no to things that do not benefit us.  We must also learn to say no to some good things and yes to God’s great things.

Have you settled into a rhythm of prayer?  Would you consider, just as a trial this next week, imitating Jesus with a brief prayer time several times a day?   Come before him with the idea of the Hebrew root of prayer, palal, on your knees before the authority seeking discernment and favor. 

June 13, 27 A.D.  Jesus invites Four Fishermen to Join Him for Sabbath #36

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , ,

Week 17 ———  Jesus invites Four Fishermen
Matthew 4:18-22     Mark 1:16-20

Last week, we discussed Jesus’ sermon in his hometown of Nazareth and how they wanted to throw him off a cliff when he was finished.  After Jesus was rejected at Nazareth, he moved his ministry base to Capernaum, on the Sea of Galilee. 

Matt. 4:18-22   While walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon (who is called Peter) and Andrew, his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen.   And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”   Immediately they left their nets and followed him.   And going on from there he saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, in the boat with Zebedee their father, mending their nets, and he called them.   Immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

When did Jesus call the disciples?  Because most of us have only read the Gospels individually, we don’t understand the chronology of how Jesus called his followers.  If you are reading the Gospel of Matthew, you don’t hear of anyone following Jesus until the story in Matthew 4 above.  Then you hear of the four fishermen “immediately” leaving their boats and following Jesus, making you wonder what would cause them to suddenly leave their jobs, their only way to feed their family, and follow someone they had never met.   If your 19-year-old son came home and told you he had just given up the family business to follow some religious teacher whom he had never met before, how would you react?  You would likely be quickly trying to find out what kind of cult had recruited your son.  This is part of the reason we are walking through the 70-week ministry of Jesus chronologically.  When you put the story of the disciples and Jesus in the proper order, it makes more sense.

We have already discussed how two of John the Baptist’s disciples began to follow Jesus after his return from the 40 days in the wilderness (John 1:35-42).  One was Andrew, who first found his brother, Simon, before he went to Jesus.  The other is unnamed, but everyone agrees it was John.  The next day, Philip and Nathaniel began to follow Jesus.  All of this happened before John the Baptist was arrested and before our passage today.  So, if Simon and Andrew were already following Jesus, why would they be fishing over two months later in Matthew 4?  Because we don’t read the gospels chronologically, we tend to mash up the stories of Jesus and the disciples and think there was only one encounter where they met him and became full-time disciples.  In fact, there is yet one more encounter with Jesus and these men about a month after our passage today.  That encounter is in Luke 5:1-11. In Jesus’ day, it was uncommon for rabbis to have full-time disciples. Most disciples maintained their ‘day jobs’ (or, in the case of fishermen, their ‘night jobs’). At this point, Andrew, Simon, James, and John have been following Jesus part-time.

Look at the invitations Jesus gives to them.  In John 1, they ask where he is staying, and he says, “Come and see.”  Not only do they spend the day with him, but they follow him to Galilee, where they see the miracle in Cana, and then they travel with him to Jerusalem for Passover.  After Passover, they are baptizing people in the Judean countryside and then travel back through Samaria to Galilee with him.  However, when Jesus returns to Jerusalem for Shavuot (Pentecost), there is no mention of disciples on that trip.  Simon and Andrew likely stayed in Galilee and ‘caught up’ on their fishing until Jesus met them again at the Sea of Galilee in our passage today.

In Matthew 4, Jesus tells Simon and Andrew, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”  “Will make” in Greek is a future tense verb, so Jesus is saying, “And I will in the future make you fishers of people.”1  Matthew says they “immediately left their nets and followed him.”  But they haven’t left their nets for good because they are fishing again (unsuccessfully) in Luke 5.  Clearly, Luke 5 is a different story.  Jesus teaches from their boat, and then they catch an ‘astounding’ amount of fish.  Then Jesus says, “Do not be afraid; from now [this present moment] on, you will be catching men.”  Then Luke 5:11 tells us,  “And when they had brought their boats to land, they left everything and followed him.”  At this point, they become full-time disciples.  Peter later says in Luke 18:28, “See, we have left our homes and followed you.”  Also, as in Matthew 19:27, “See, we have left everything and followed you.”

For years, we have thought that Jesus had one meeting with Simon and Andrew, and they became disciples. In the same way, we think of our coming to Jesus as a one-time decision.  Instead, we see with these men that it was a process, a journey.  The old Chinese proverb, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” is indeed true. But it’s not much of a journey if the only step you take is the first one.  So let me add my own Southern Boy proverb: “A journey of a single step is not much of a journey.”  Today, our churches are filled with people who have decided to believe in Jesus, taken that first step, and then halted. They may attend church, but if you engage them in a conversation about their spiritual journey, they often mention their church membership and baptism.  They have little to say if you ask about their ongoing relationship with God.

Let’s say I invited you to go on a trip.  I ask you to ensure you have your passport and I pick you up and we load your suitcases in the car.  We drive to the airport and then sit in the parking lot for an hour and never leave the vehicle.  Then, maybe one day a week from then on, we load up the car again, drive to the airport, sit there for an hour, and then go home. That is not much of a trip.  But this is like many people’s walk with Jesus.  They start, then they stop.  They think about starting again once a week or so, but they don’t.  This is not discipleship.

Discipleship in Jesus’ day was much like the idea of apprenticeship.  In Jesus’ day, and for thousands of years afterward, if you wanted to learn a trade, say you wanted to be a blacksmith, you didn’t go to blacksmith school.  There was no correspondence course or YouTube videos.  You became an apprentice.  You would often go and live with the blacksmith in his house.  You would follow him everywhere he went.  You would wake up when he woke up, sleep when he slept, and do whatever needed to be done.  For a long time, you would just tend the fire or sweep the shop, all the while watching your mentor.  One day, he might let you hold the sword in the fire or the horseshoe as he hit it with his hammer.   Over the years, by observation and then imitation, you would slowly become like the blacksmith, able to see when the metal was hot enough to form and swing the hammer as he did.  It was a process over the years.

When Jesus called the disciples to ‘Follow me,’ it literally meant ‘come after me’ or ‘come behind me.’  Think of putting your feet right in the footsteps of Jesus, who is walking ahead of you, as if walking in a minefield.  Where Jesus stepped before is safe, so keep your feet in line with him.  You move as he moves; you step where he stepped.  You see how he greets people, how he talks to people, how he loves people.  You see how he prays to His Father, seeks His Father’s direction, and studies and memorizes and uses His Father’s scriptures, how he teaches, and how he heals.  All of this to become like him.

The point is not just to know what Jesus knows or even to do what Jesus does. The point is to be who Jesus is—a reflection of Jesus.

Francis Chan, in his book Multiply, said: 

“It’s impossible to be a disciple or a follower of someone and not end up like that person. Jesus said, “A disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher” (Luke 6:40). That’s the whole point of being a disciple of Jesus: we imitate Him, carry on His ministry, and become like Him in the process.  Yet somehow many have come to believe that a person can be a “Christian” without being like Christ. A “follower” who doesn’t follow. How does that make any sense? Many people in the church have decided to take on the name of Christ and nothing else. This would be like Jesus walking up to those first disciples and saying, “Hey, would you guys mind identifying yourselves with Me in some way? Don’t worry; I don’t actually care if you do anything I do or change your lifestyle at all. I’m just looking for people who are willing to say they believe in Me and call themselves Christians.” 2 

Again, discipleship is not a one-time decision. It is a journey full of decisions. Discipleship is not knowing the right things. The process is not informational but transformational. You don’t just learn more about Jesus; you become more like him.  

For Jesus’ disciples, things didn’t come instantly or even quickly.  Jesus’ disciples made many mistakes.  He had to explain many things repeatedly because it took them a while to understand.  He tried to teach them about compassion to the Samaritans, and a bit later, they asked him if they could ask God to rain down fire from heaven and consume them.   Another time, Jesus is explaining God’s great plan of salvation and how he had to suffer and die, and Peter says, “No way I’m letting that happen.”  Even up to Jesus’ last day, they had trouble grasping what was going on.  Yet Jesus had patience with them.  “While the Gospels record many instances of Jesus instantly healing people’s illnesses, we know of not even one instance in which he simply waved his hand to fix an ugly habit for one of his disciples immediately. Instead, he kept teaching and correcting them, giving them time to grow.”3

Ok, fellow disciples, does that make you feel better?  You don’t have to understand everything and get it all right to be a disciple.  The process of discipleship is about learning from your mistakes by keeping your eyes on the master.  Jesus knew his disciples were going to step off the path.  He knew they were going to take their eyes off him.  Remember the story of Jesus walking on water.  That is an excellent picture of discipleship.  Peter saw his master walking on water and began to imitate Jesus.  He got out of the boat and started walking on the water.  Then he got distracted by the wind, took his eyes off Jesus and began to sink.  But Jesus didn’t just watch him falter; he didn’t yell at him for being a poor disciple. He reached out his hand to pull him up, and they walked back to the boat together.  

There will be times in your walk with Jesus when you take your eyes off the master.  Like Simon Peter, you get distracted by the things of this world.  You will make mistakes and wander off the path; you may feel you have made such a mess of your life that you are sinking in the deep.  But Jesus is standing there holding his hand out to help you back on the path.  If that is where you are today, know that you can’t frustrate Jesus more than Peter did.  I am so glad the Bible shows all the impulsive, goofy things that Peter said and did.  If Jesus can put up with Peter, he can certainly put up with you.

Just before Jesus’ last supper with his disciples, Jesus washed their feet.  

John 13:12-15   When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to them, “Do you understand what I have done to you?   You call me teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am.   If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.   For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you

He is discipling unto the end.  Follow my example.  Act as I act.  Love as I love, serve as I serve. Be who I am.  Did you notice that he said, “You call me Lord and Teacher?”  There is an essential difference in those two terms.  You can be a student of someone without being a disciple.  You can sit in their class and listen to their lectures.  Perhaps you even take notes.  You can gain information.  But it is only about being informed, not being transformed.  A disciple is much more.  A disciple seeks to imitate the heart and actions of their master, their lord.  A disciple is changing behavior.  Jesus expected his disciples to be obedient:

Luke 6.46  “Why do you call me lord, lord and not do the things I say?”

A student of a Rabbi (teacher) seeks information, while a disciple of the lord (master) seeks transformation.

At the meal that follows the foot washing,  Jesus tells them one of them will betray him.  

Matthew 26:20-22   When it was evening, he reclined at the table with the twelve.  And as they were eating, he said, “Truly, I say to you, one of you will betray me.”   And they were very sorrowful and began to say to him one after another…

Matthew tells us each disciple asks, one after the other, “Is it I, Lord?”.  Then, in verse 25, Matthew tells us, “Judas who would betray him said: “Is it I, Rabbi?”  You see, there is a difference between calling Jesus your rabbi or teacher and calling him Lord or Master.  If you are a student out to learn information, you have a rabbi or teacher.  If you are a disciple out for transformation, you have a master or Lord.  Judas was only a student, not a disciple.

The last thing Jesus says in Matthew is Go and make disciples.  Somehow, we read this and think he said, Go and make people who believe in me. Go and make converts who believe the right things.

How can we be apprentices of Jesus?  Again, an apprentice would live with the master, watch his every move, and imitate everything he does.   So, we need to live with Jesus. We can’t do that like the original disciples did.  Even before Jesus left the earth and ascended into heaven, only a few could be with him constantly; only a few could apprentice under him.   But God had a plan.  “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth (John 13:16-17).  Later, Jesus tells them, “I will not leave you as orphans” (John 14:18).  God had a plan for us.  God’s Holy Spirit will come and be with you forever.  We can’t live with Jesus right now, but his spirit will live in us and teach and help us.  However, an apprentice not only lives with the master but also observes the master and imitates all he does.  How do we observe and imitate Jesus’ actions?

Fortunately, we have 4 Gospels that tell us much of what Jesus said and did.  But we must read them like disciples, not as students.   We must not just read the Bible for information; we read for transformation.  Jesus didn’t just read the scriptures; he studied them, memorized them, and lived them.  This is why we read, study, and memorize — to imitate Jesus.  Not just to know what he knew but to live as he lived.  So we have Jesus’ Bible (the Old Testament), the gospels of Jesus, and then the records of what his disciples did — examples of his apprentices who went out and did what Jesus did, lived as Jesus did.

We must pray like Jesus. Jesus prayed a lot, and he taught us how to pray. The prayer he gave us (the Lord’s Prayer)—don’t pray it like a student who memorized it but a disciple who intends to live it.

Acts 10:38 tells us Jesus went about doing good.  Everywhere he went, he lifted people up.  He healed the sick, freed people from oppression, helped them in the moment, and gave them hope.  That’s what he gave the woman at the well who was living in depression in a hopeless state.  He gave her hope.  

You probably have Romans 8:28 memorized.  It says: 
“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.”
But do you know the next verse?
Romans 8:29  “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son,”
Don’t get hung up on the “foreknew” and “Predestined” words.  I don’t think the point of this verse is the theology of limited or unlimited atonement but more about discipleship, God’s plan to redeem the world.  The process of discipleship is transformational, becoming more like Jesus.  Or, to say it another way, to be conformed to the image of God’s Son.  This is the story of the Bible.  In the beginning, God created us in His image.   Our destiny is to be in the image of God.  This is what God predestined for us from the beginning of time.  But sin tarnished that image.  When we choose to sin, we abandon that image.  By allowing Jesus to cleanse us from sin and becoming his disciple, we become more like him.  

The story of the Bible is the story of God redeeming all of creation.  He is in the process of redeeming us, returning us to his Image and to a place where we can commune with him as he originally designed in the Garden.   Discipleship is God’s plan to conform us to his image.

Where are you in your journey with Jesus?  Have you taken that first step?  Have you decided to follow Jesus, become his disciple, his apprentice?  Have you taken that first step or those first few steps and then stopped?  Maybe you are sitting in the car with Jesus once a week at the airport and never getting out.  Have you gotten distracted and stepped away from your apprenticeship?  Have you stopped following in his footsteps and wandered a little off the path?  Or maybe you are ready to go all in—no turning back. You want to be a proper apprentice, study the master’s ways, and do as the master does. 

Jesus is still calling.

  1. The Greek word ‘anthropoi’ refers here to both men and women
  2. Chan, Francis.  Multiply: Disciples Making Disciples.  page 16.
  3. Spangler, Ann and Tverberg, Lois.  Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus: How the Jewishness of Jesus Can Transform Your Faith.    Kindle edition, Location 937

June 7, 27 A.D.  Jesus proclaims the Year of Yehovah- The Year of the Lord’s Favor #35

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , , , ,

Week 16 ———  Jesus proclaims the Year of Yehovah in the synagogue in Nazareth
Luke 4:14-30

On the day before the feast of Shavuot (Pentecost) in 27 AD, Jesus healed the man at the pool of Bethesda.  The following day, June 1, Jesus teaches in the Temple on Shavuot (John 5:16-47).  In that teaching, he refers to John the Baptist’s ministry in the past tense, and we are told (in Matthew 4:12, Mark 1:14a, and Luke 4:14-15) that he is aware that John has been arrested by Herod.  The following day, he begins his journey back to Galilee and arrives in Nazareth on June 6.

Luke 4:14-30   And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, and a report about him went out through all the surrounding country.   And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all.

And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read.   And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”   And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth. And they said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?”  And he said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘“Physician, heal yourself.” What we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’”   And he said, “Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown.   But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow.  And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.”   When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath.   And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built so that they could throw him down the cliff.   But passing through their midst, he went away.

 “And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day.”

We have delved into the worship in the Temple and the significance of God’s appointed times (feasts). However, it is crucial to understand that religious life in Jesus’ era revolved around the small synagogues in every town, and Jesus went to this synagogue all his life. As we do today, there would be a solemn scripture reading and a sermon. Unlike our modern practice, there was no designated ‘preacher,’ but one of the adult males would be asked to read and speak.  If you were to visit a synagogue today, you would witness a reading from the Torah (Genesis to Deuteronomy) and then from the Haftarah (the prophets/writings) followed by a sermon.  Today, every Jewish congregation reads from the same assigned portion of the scriptures on an annual cycle.  The Torah reading on day one commences in Genesis 1.  The year culminates with the final word of Deuteronomy, and the scroll is rolled back to Genesis 1 again in a joyous atmosphere with singing and dancing (the day is called “Simchat Torah” – “the joy of the Torah.1”). Every week, the same section of scripture is read in every synagogue, a practice that has been faithfully upheld for almost 1000 years.  

In 1896, a massive cache of documents was discovered in a Cairo synagogue. Many synagogues have a storeroom called a genizah (Hebrew for ‘hiding place’) for scripture scrolls and books that are too worn to use but too holy to discard because they contain God’s name.  They generally serve as a holding place for the documents until they are buried.  Fortunately for us, no one ever got around to burying any documents in this synagogue. Some of these in the genizah in Cairo were over 1000 years old.  Until their discovery, we had no Hebrew copy of Ecclesiastes; our oldest copy was in Greek.  The genizah also contained a different set of annual readings that were used before the ones we use today.  This was a 3 to 3 1/2-year reading cycle through the Torah, which continued to be used in some synagogues until 1100 AD.  There were no set readings of the Haftarah as we have today, but apparently, the reader chose the passage.  Passages that reflected the theme or beginning words of the Torah portion were chosen.

Jesus returns to the town he grew up in as an itinerant rabbi and is invited to read the assigned Torah portion and a Haftarah section of scripture of his choosing that matches. Then, he gives a brief sermon.  Luke doesn’t tell us about the assigned Torah portion that Jesus would have read (my best guess is Leviticus 25 -about the year of Jubilee – let me know your thoughts on this.)  Jesus then hands over the Torah scroll and is given the Isaiah scroll.

“He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written…”

Remember, there are no chapter or verse numbers.  He turns to the end of the Isaiah scroll (our chapter 66) and rolls the scroll to the right to back up (remember Hebrew is read right to the left) to the section that would be our chapter 61.  You must be familiar with the scriptures to choose a proper section of the prophets to match the Torah portion and then find it.

The Haftarah Portion
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Jesus quotes Isaiah 61:1-2a.2  This is a continuation of Isaiah’s messianic prophecy where Isaiah has the Messiah speaking, telling us what he will do. Remember, “Messiah” is a Hebrew word translated as “anointed one.”  Jesus is anointed, and the spirit descends on him at his baptism.   He is now reading this passage of Isaiah as the Messiah, announcing the “year of the Lord’s favor.”   Isaiah borrows the language of the Leviticus 25 jubilee year, but this is something much more.

Leviticus 25 has commandments about two special years. The first is the Sabbath year, which states that every seven years, the land rests.  You do not sow crops, prune vines, or reap any crops this year.  It is a Sabbath for the land.  Anyone may harvest what they need at the moment that grows of itself on any land, as they did when they were nomads.  The promise was that there would be a great harvest the year before the year of rest so they would have plenty (echoing the gathering of manna in the wilderness).   But you can imagine how it would take a lot of faith for these farmers to forgo a planting season.  The breaking of this command is why the Babylon exile lasted 70 years.  Because they didn’t let the land rest, God removed the people from the land to allow the land to rest and make up for the 490 years they didn’t keep the Sabbath years. So, 70 years of exile.3

2 Chronicles 36:20-21  He took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped from the sword, and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate, it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years.

 Leviticus also tells us that after seven cycles of the seven years, the following year (every 50 years) is a year of Jubilee.  The same rules apply for the land, but there is also a reset of the land.  Any land that has been sold returns to the original owner.   Anyone who had to sell themselves as an indentured servant was set free.  All debts were forgiven.  That way, the land would remain in the same families as God initially divided it, and any families that had fallen into poverty would have hope that their poor condition would not curse the family forever.   It was a year of good news for families that had fallen on hard times and become destitute.4

Maybe you didn’t recall reading about these special years in Leviticus 25, but there is one verse you might remember:

Leviticus 25:10   And you shall consecrate the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you.

You may have seen that middle section of the verse in an interesting place.  Check the footnotes for the answer.5

The prophecy in Isaiah takes this concept of a Jubilee year to another level.   It is not just a time of rest for the land and a reset of land and monetary debts. This is a year in which the Messiah himself will preach good news to the poor, liberty to those captive or oppressed, and will give sight to the blind.  The year has begun at Shavuot and will continue to the following Shavuot when God will bless with the gift of the Holy Spirit.  This is the time of the ministry of the Messiah.  God’s favor has come in its greatest fashion with the gift of Jesus and the Holy Spirit.  In this year’s time, the spring feasts (Passover, First Fruits, Unleavened Bread, and Shavuot) will be fulfilled.

How do the people react?
When I read a familiar Bible story, I attempt to reread it several times from the perspective of all involved.  So, let’s walk through how Jesus’ friends and neighbors in the synagogue that day would react.   At first, they are proud that their friend has been chosen to read the scripture and comment, and they are probably a little excited to hear what he will say.

Jesus reads the portion, stops reading, hands the scroll to the attendant, and sits down.6  Then Luke says the people just stare at him.  They are puzzled.  Why are they staring?  Because Jesus stopped reading in the middle of the sentence.  This was a very familiar passage and he stops short of the usual conclusion.  They know the scriptures, so they know what he left out of the Isaiah passage. (Do you know what Jesus left out?)7  Why did Jesus stop reading prematurely?  And if they weren’t already confused, he says, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  How do you think the people responded to this?  It is one thing to talk about scripture prophecies and pray that they will come true one day.  It is a whole other thing for someone to say that the prophecy from long ago is coming true today, and it is all about me.  This is a shocking statement.  Jesus claims to be the promised Messiah and tells his family and friends that he grew up with that this is the beginning of a Jubilee year like they have never imagined. Many in the room are immediately angered that this boy they grew up with is making such a claim.  In my mother’s vocabulary, they are thinking, “he has gotten too big for his britches.”  His friends hear this and get worried.  To claim to be the Messiah is risky.  If you make that claim, and you are not the Messiah, then you will be stoned.  He continues, and as we will see, the peoples’ reaction competes its swing from excitement and anticipation to puzzlement, to fear to wrath.

Jesus stopped reading the passage after it said, “He has sent me to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” and did not read the following line: “…and the day of vengeance of our God.”  Jesus is teaching them something about this passage in Isaiah that they never considered.  He is letting them know that the ministry of the Messiah is in two stages.  First, the Messiah comes with good news: to right wrongs and to set people free.  Today, he says, that is beginning.  The second phase is the “day of vengeance,” when he will come to deal with those who refuse to accept him as king.  The Jews had always understood that the year of favor and the day of vengeance would come together, so they sought a Messiah who would bring justice and redemption by destroying the oppressors.  But Jesus stops with the year of favor announcement and says today is the day for this.  Jesus tells Nicodemus in John 3:17 that “God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved.”   Jesus tells the woman caught in adultery  No man condemns you, and neither do I.  This is not a time for condemnation!  (That is not our job now or ever.)  The time for judgment and vengeance will come later. Theologians call this concept of dividing passages in different time periods “historical stratification,” and the rabbis did this frequently.  They just missed it here.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of this concept.  For hundreds of years, the Jews had been taught that the Messiah would come with favor and with vengeance.  They expected the Messiah to lead a rebellion against the evil nations that held them captive.  The Jews of Jesus’ day expected a Messiah who would bring an end to Roman rule over them.  Instead, they see Rome conquer Jesus, crucifying him like a criminal.  So, they reject Jesus as their Messiah.  It is to these friends of Jesus, the people he has known his entire earthly life, that Jesus reveals this necessary correction of their misinterpretation of scripture.  Jesus wants them (and everyone) to understand God’s plan and accept him.  His heart must have broken to see his friends and neighbors rise against him.

Jesus sees this reaction on their faces and understands their trouble recognizing this fellow they knew as an awkward teenager as the Messiah.  He knows they are like many in this day, wanting to see miracles, which he has not done in Nazareth to this point.  Jesus has revealed the most important spiritual concept in history to these people — and they don’t appreciate it.  They would rather have had a miracle.  This happened over and over in Jesus’ ministry.  He tells some Pharisees several times, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign” (Matthew 12:39 and 16:4).   Why wouldn’t they, of all people, get a miracle?  Jesus answers the question on their mind with two examples of how many were in need, but only a few got the miracle.  And the examples he gives are times when a Gentile, not a Jew, got the miracle.  At this point, the crowd’s response has completed its shift from pride in the hometown boy to wrath.  This is not the sermon they bargained for.  

Jesus is accused of blasphemy because it is blasphemy to say you are God (unless you are.)  The penalty for blasphemy was stoning to death.  One of the alternate methods of stoning is pushing someone off a cliff.  If the rocks don’t kill them in the fall, you can always finish with some thrown.  But this is not Jesus’ time to die.  He will suffer a much more horrible death for that accusation of blasphemy later, but not now.   So they escort him to a cliff to carry out his sentence.  The people wanted to see a miracle, and Jesus gave them one, but not the one they wanted.  He walked right through the middle of them unharmed.  

Jesus came to his hometown, announcing that he was the Messiah and reminding them what Isaiah had said the Messiah would do.  But they wouldn’t hear it.  They were spiritually blind and didn’t know it.  The Son of God stood before them and shared the truth of God with them.  But it disagreed with their understanding, so they rejected him.

What is Jesus’ message for us?  Or do you even want his message?  Would you rather have a miracle?  If you ask anyone on the street, how would they answer?  Most are like the people in Nazareth.  They would rather have a miracle than hear the word of God. Be very careful.  The Bible is clear that many false messiahs and false prophets will do miracles and lead many astray (Mark 13:22).  God’s Word, God’s truth, is more important than miracles.   

Jesus’ message is the same for us today.  This is what Jesus came to do.  It is what he still wants to do for you today, what he still wants to do for your neighbor.  He has good news for the poor and the poor in spirit, for those who have no hope economically and those who have no hope spiritually.  As we stand before God, without Jesus, we are spiritually bankrupt.  Jesus’ message is good news for those who know they are spiritually in need.  For those who think they are already in good standing with God because they go to church and do all the right things, Jesus’ message is not as good.   For those who have no hope, for those who realize they are spiritually doomed due to their sin, Jesus is the best news ever.


For those who are held captive to the powers of sin, Jesus proclaims liberty.  We have all seen movies where our military rescues prisoners of war.  To see their rescuers is the best news. No more do we have to deal hopelessly with those sins that so easily beset us.  No more do we suffer through addictions, to drugs, to alcohol, to pornography, to bitterness, to malice.  Jesus has come to set us free from these prisons.  

No more do we have to suffer from oppression. Oppression is the “exercise of authority or power in a burdensome, cruel, or unjust manner.”   Spiritual oppression is rampant today.  Many suffer from depression, heaviness, sadness, anxiety, loneliness, isolation, busyness, and shame — and much of this is oppression by the evil in this world.  Jesus has come to set us free from oppression.  I Corinthians says we are oppressed but not crushed by it.  God’s power can bring us victory over oppression.

Jesus also came to give recovery of sight to people who are blind.   Jesus did this literally a few times, but he spent more time trying to do something much more critical: giving sight to those with spiritual blindness.  God was there among them, but they could not see it. Even when he told them, they could not accept it.  They thought they understood what the Messiah would be like and refused to let go of the tradition they had been taught even when God told them differently.  We must not fall into the same trap they did.  They just accepted what they were told about the scripture without reading it for themselves.  Do you do that?  

“Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” (Acts 17:11)

This is how you hear a sermon; this is how you read a blog.  Listen/read eagerly, then go home and examine the scriptures daily to see if it was true.  If the apostle Paul came in and preached next Sunday in your church, you shouldn’t accept what he said without going home and examining the Scriptures.  And what Scriptures was Paul talking about here? The Old Testament was the only scripture Paul and the Bereans had.   We have more (thank you, Jesus), but even if we didn’t, Paul said the Old Testament was sufficient to show the mind of God.  Do you want to make me very happy?   Study the scriptures yourself, then come and discuss what I have discussed and ask questions.  This is what discipleship is.

Now that you have this background, watch this clip from “The Chosen” of this passage. Notice the reaction of the Rabbi and the crowd to Jesus. How would you have reacted?

  1. Simchat Torah in 2024 begins the evening of October 24.
  2. There are some differences between Luke’s quotes and the original Isaiah in the Hebrew text vs the Greek Septuagint version.  I’ll leave these minor issues to the scholars.
  3. It is common for modern readers to claim 2 Chronicles 7:14 as a promise to us. (“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”)  I wonder if those who wish to claim this promise to Israel as a promise to us today understand that healing of the land required the nation being conquered and people living in exile for 70 years.
  4. Some scholars maintain that there never was an observation of any Jubilee year. 
  5. See the pictures below for the answer.  There is no evidence that Israel ever practiced the Jubilee year.   Similarly, the word on the bell that was crafted almost 250 years ago, announcing liberty for all inhabitants of the Land, did not ring true when it was first used. For nearly 100 years after the bell proclaimed liberty, many inhabitants of the land continued to live as enslaved people.
  6. In synagogue tradition, you stand to read the scriptures but sit to teach.
  7. Jesus quotes the Scriptures frequently. If you want to understand what Jesus is saying, it is a good practice to read the quotation in its context in the Old Testament to understand what the passage means and how Jesus is using it.

May 31, 27 A.D.  Healing at the Pool of Bethesda – The Year of the Lord’s Favor #34

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , ,

Week 15 ———  Healing at the Pool of Bethesda
John 5:1-18

John 5:1  After this, there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
2   Now there is in Jerusalem by the Sheep Gate a pool, in Hebrew called Bethesda, which has five roofed colonnades. 
3   In these lay a multitude of invalids—blind, lame, and paralyzed. 
5   One man was there who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 
6   When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had already been there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?” 
7   The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.” 
8   Jesus said to him, “Get up, take up your bed, and walk.” 
9   And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.  Now that day was the Sabbath. 
10  So the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to take up your bed.”
11   But he answered them, “The man who healed me, that man said to me, ‘Take up your bed, and walk.’” 
12   They asked him, “Who is the man who said to you, ‘Take up your bed and walk’?” 
13   Now the man who had been healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had withdrawn, as there was a crowd in the place. 
14   Afterward Jesus found him in the temple and said to him, “See, you are well! Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” 
15   The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had healed him. 
16   And this was why the Jews were persecuting Jesus because he was doing these things  on the Sabbath. 
17   But Jesus answered them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”
18   This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God

John 5:1 After this, there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
John doesn’t specify this feast. You know which feast comes next if you have studied the Old Testament. Those with only cursory knowledge might know of only Passover and not the other ‘appointed times,’ which may lead to their assuming every feast is Passover. (If this was another Passover, then a year has passed since John 2, and there is another Passover in John 6:4, which means that almost nothing happens in 2 years of their presumed 3-year ministry of Jesus.)  The timing we are using in this 70-week ministry of Jesus fits well, and we know that the next feast is Shavuot (the Feast of Weeks), which is 50 days after Passover.  

The physical setting of this story is the Pool of Bethesda, and the story of this pool is complicated. John’s gospel has two stories of healing in Jerusalem, and they both involve pools. For centuries, scholars said these pools did not exist and that the Gospel of John was historically unreliable, written by someone (not John, the disciple) who had never been to Jerusalem. They said the pools didn’t exist because they had not found evidence of them in excavations yet.  

This is a recurring theme—the science of archeology disproves the Bible because we haven’t found it yet. Scholars said that Belshazzar, the king of Babylon in Daniel, never existed, for there was no record of him; thus, the book of Daniel was fiction. That is until they found this clay cylinder in 1854 that told the story of Belshazzar, forcing them to rewrite their history books to match the Bible.

The Hittites are mentioned throughout the Old Testament, but scholars maintained the Bible just made them up.  They insisted they never existed because they couldn’t find mention of the empire anywhere.  Now, it is one thing to deny the presence of one man, but it is a whole other level to deny the existence of an entire nation.  Then, in the early 1900s, they discovered in modern-day Turkey the city of Hattusha, a vast city of the Hittites with a library with over 10,000 tablets.  Again, the history books must be rewritten to align with Biblical History.

Scholars also had no evidence of a king over Israel named David or a House of David as his descendants who reigned in Israel. The House of David is a significant historical fact in a large portion of the Bible and is essential in the lineage of the Messiah. Scholars said David was merely an Israeli legend—until 1993 when a stele was found that describes the kings who were descendants of David as from the “house of David.”  

Archeology and history are important and developing sciences that have brought us a better understanding of the culture of the Bible.  But to say something does not exist because we haven’t found it yet is unreasonable. (If you ever lose your car keys, don’t call a historian and an archeologist to help you look for them; they will say that your car never had any keys and the keys don’t exist.) The pool of Bethesda is described as having five porticos (covered porches).  Archeologists had looked for a pool with five sides but found none.  Then, they found this double pool in the late 1800s with a dividing portico. (Thus, there are four side porticos and one between the pools.)  It is located just south of the temple area in Jerusalem.   Here it is in the model of First Century Jerusalem.1

Look back on our scripture from this morning.  Notice anything missing?  
There is no verse 4 in this ESV version.  In fact, verse 4 is missing from most modern translations.  Here is verse 4 in the King James Version:

4  For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had.

This is one of several examples where notes were inserted into later versions and became part of the text.  It is easy to see how this one happened.  Verse seven has the man saying, 

“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.”

Remember that until the invention of the printing press in the 1400s, all scripture (and all other books) was copied by hand.  What likely happened is that when copying the Bible, someone added a note explaining the reason the invalid needs to go into the pool when the water is stirred up.  Frequently, scribes add notes in the margin of the text when copying.  The problem is that the next scribe copying his work thinks that the writing in the margin is a verse that he accidentally omitted and had to write in the margin.  So that next scribe inserts it into the text. The first scribe’s note has become part of the ‘scripture.’

Here is a clear example of this.  In this copy of 1 John, the copyist wrote a note in the margin.  You can look at the earlier version of this exact text; the note is not there.  The version copied from this one incorporates the note into the text as if it were part of the original text. (1 John 5:7b-8)

Our oldest and most reliable texts do not have verse four in this passage.  The KJV relied on manuscripts after 1100 AD, while we now have manuscripts almost 1000 years earlier.  None of our texts before 500 AD have verse 4. 

 There was quite a stir when the NIV was published, and there were 49 verses “missing.” Oddly, I found this same dire warning on a friend’s FaceBook post this week after I wrote this.  Do not let this trouble you.  We are just trying to ensure we are using the most accurate copies.  I have friends who write notes in the margins of their Bibles.  I don’t think any of them want their notes to be incorporated into scripture.  In a few weeks, I will show you the one I am sure the NIV should have left out but did not.

The set of two pools functioned well as a mikvah for ceremonial bathing, which was required before entering the Temple.2  The water in mikveh had to be “living water,” flowing water from a natural source, not drawn from a well.  The upper pool would catch rainwater as it fell and serve as a holding tank.  Then, as needed, a door was opened in the wall between the pools to allow water to flow into the lower pool.   This would ensure the lower pool would not become stagnant.  When the water flowed, it was not hard to imagine that it would be ‘stirred.’   Then, it became a superstition or legend to the point that there was a multitude of people there who were “blind, lame, or paralyzed.”  People desperate for healing will believe and try almost anything. 

I am not fond of the word ‘invalid.’  I know it literally means “not strong,” and we have taken it to mean ‘weak from disease or injury,’ but it is too close to ‘invalidate’ and makes it sound (to me) like we are saying ‘worthless.’  When you have been sick for a long time, it is easy to feel worthless. And this man had been in this position for 38 years.  And now he has put his hope on healing on a pagan myth.  

Jesus sees him and doesn’t see him as worthless.  He doesn’t preach to him about his pagan thoughts.  He sees a man who has suffered for a long time and is now hopeless.  There is a lot we could talk about in this passage.  The Pharisees make a big deal because this healing took place on a Sabbath, and the man was carrying his mat, breaking their rules.  ‘Bethesda’ means house of mercy.  They ignore the miracle; they care nothing about the mercy shown and that this man is now able to walk; they focus on their own picky rule about what you can and can’t carry on the Sabbath because Jesus is a threat to their system.  But I want to focus on two things I think are important in this passage: First, Jesus’s aspect of healing, and Second, how about the other people who were there for healing but were not healed?

Jesus asks this man an odd question, and the King James Version does a better job with this translation:  “Wilt thou be made whole?”  Other versions say “…be made well” or “…be healed,” but wholeness is what Jesus is really talking about. He could have said, “Do you want to be able to walk?” but that is only one thing this man needs. He needs more than the use of his legs.  

There is a difference between being well and being whole.  There is a word in Hebrew for wholeness that I suspect Jesus would have used when he talked to this man.  It is ‘shalom.’  Shalom can be translated strictly as ‘peace.’  We define peace as an absence of war with our enemies.  The Hebrew definition is not just an absence of war but whole and complete relations with everyone and God.  Shalom is how God meant the world to be, how he created the garden in Eden to be — a place where people are in proper relations with others and with God.  Sin destroys shalom.  It breaks our relationship with others and with God.  And God is in the process of returning the world to the way it was in the garden.

When Isaiah predicts the coming Messiah, he calls him the ‘Prince of Shalom.’  Why is Jesus called the ‘Prince of Peace’?  Because only through what Jesus accomplishes on the cross can we again have true peace with God.  

Rom. 5:1   Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we
                  have shalom with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Our sins broke the relationship, broke the peace.  By taking away our sins, our shalom with God can be restored.  But shalom with God is more than just a removal of our sins.  It is walking with God hand in hand, as Adam did in the garden.  Note that walking with God means walking in the same direction.  We must go God’s way to be in step with God.  If you are setting your own path and not depending on God to pick the path, then you can not walk with God.

Wholeness begins with a right relationship with God.  It is essential to get this vertical relationship settled first.  You can’t have proper relationships with any other person (horizontal relationship) until you are whole in your relationship with God.  We live in a world where over 50% of marriages end in divorce.  Why do so many relationships fail? Les Parrot, a professor of psychology, ordained pastor, and New York Times bestselling author, says the primary problem is that people believe in the romantic fairy tale and that we need to find that person who will make us whole.  We have bought into the fairy tale that there is one person out there who will make us complete.  He says most relationships fail because we rush into them before we are whole -before we settle the most important relationship with God.  Wholeness begins with a right relationship with God but does not end there.

To have true shalom, you must also be in the right relationship with others. You can’t have a broken relationship with one of God’s children and a right relationship with the Father.  

1 John 4:20-21   If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom, he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.

Again, you can’t be in a feud with one of God’s kids and say you love the Father.  This is why Jesus says, “Love your enemies”. 

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “You have heard it said, do not murder, but I say to you, don’t be angry with your brother.”  Jesus has zero tolerance for broken relationships.  He wants us to have Shalom. (note)

In that same passage, Jesus tells us to walk out of the church and not to give an offering.

Matthew 5:23-24   So, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First, be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. 

I am still waiting for a preacher to stand up before the offering and say, “If you are about to put some money in the offering plate, and there is any person that you are not getting along with, then do not put the money in the offering plate until you have gone to them and made things right.”

Do you see how important shalom is to God?  It is so important that it became the traditional greeting of people when they met in the Old Testament, and it is still among those who speak Hebrew today.  Typically, you hear “Shalom aleichem,”  which means “peace be unto you.”  And the usual response is “Aleichem shalom,” meaning “Unto you peace.”   We often greet people with “How are you?” or “How is it going?”  The Hebrew equivalent of this is “Mah Shalomcha,”  or “How is your shalom,” or “How is your peace?”  The idea of peace and proper relations with God and others is so important.4

So Jesus asks this man, “Do you want to be whole?”  Because wholeness is more than regaining the ability to walk.  He has been down for 38 years.  Have you ever been sick for an extended period of time?  There is depression. There are thoughts that God has forgotten you or doesn’t care about you. There are feelings of uselessness. You begin to see the world differently and develop attitudes that harm your relationship with others.  Jesus sees a man who needs more than physical healing.  He needs shalom.

The man answers Jesus:
“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up, and while I am going another steps down before me.”

He tells Jesus why he can’t get the pagan healing he is waiting for.  And Jesus does not rebuke him for his pagan beliefs.  He does not ask him to correct his theology.3  He simply says, “Rise up and walk.”   And he does.  Jesus starts him on a path to shalom by removing what this man saw as his primary problem.  Then Jesus leaves so quickly that the man doesn’t have time to get his name.   That brings me to the more difficult question this morning.   We know that there was a ‘multitude’ of sick people there at the pool.  Why did Jesus only heal this one and then quickly leave?  We could reason out some possible answers, such as that he knew the Pharisees would be after him if he hung around.  However, as we read the scriptures, there are other people Jesus doesn’t heal.  

For example, the man Peter and John see at the gate of the Temple in Acts 3:
Acts 3:1-10   Now Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, the ninth hour.  And a man lame from birth was being carried, whom they laid daily at the gate of the temple that is called the Beautiful Gate to ask alms of those entering the temple.   Seeing Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked to receive alms.  And Peter directed his gaze at him, as did John, and said, “Look at us.”  And he fixed his attention on them, expecting to receive something from them.  But Peter said, “I have no silver and gold, but what I do have I give to you.  In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!”  And he took him by the right hand and raised him up, and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong.   And leaping up, he stood and began to walk, and entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God.   And all the people saw him walking and praising God, and recognized him as the one who sat at the Beautiful Gate of the temple, asking for alms. And they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.

This man has been daily at this gate of the Temple for a long time.  Acts 4:22 tells us he is 40 years old.  He is well-known to many people who pass by him frequently.  Jesus likely passed by him many times, but he was not healed then.  We know Jesus healed in the Temple.

Matt. 21:14   And the blind and the lame came to him in the temple, and he healed them.

Why was he not in the group healed then?  Why was he passed by without healing?  We can ask the same question ourselves.  Why doesn’t God heal everyone?

In High School, I had a friend hit by a car.  I prayed hard for him that he would survive.  He did not.  I spent hours beside my little friend Patrick’s bed when I was a resident at Children’s Hospital in Boston.  I could not bear the thought of this sweet 4-year-old dying after his Bone Marrow Transplant.  He had been through so much with Leukemia and remissions.  I had taken care of him for years.  He did not survive.  Last year, I got the call that my brother was being rushed to the hospital in serious condition.  Many prayed.  He did not recover.  Far too many times, I have found myself praying while I am in the middle of resuscitating a premature newborn that God will perform a miracle and allow these too-young lungs to function.  Far too many times, I have had to walk into a room and tell young parents the baby did not make it. We all know friends and family that we have prayed for who did not receive healing.

Why does God not heal everyone?  
He could. Sometimes, we don’t help people because we lack the resources. Some wonderful people read this blog.  I would love to give each person who reads this blog one million dollars just to see what they could do with it.  I’d like to, but I don’t have the resources. That is not God’s problem.  But there are other reasons we don’t help sometimes. We have learned this in our homeless ministry.  We have gotten calls from people to try to help get them out of jail.  But at that point in their life, jail is the best place for them.  Sometimes, you must let people hit rock bottom before they see they need to change their lives.  Sometimes, helping someone prevents them from ever learning to help themselves.  It creates dependence on you or others when they need to learn to handle their own problems.

For another explanation of why God doesn’t heal everyone, watch this clip from The Chosen.  Here, James the lesser (little James) is portrayed as a man with a severe limp.  He has just been told that the disciples will be sent out two by two and will be given the power to heal others.  James is puzzled by the fact that he will be able to heal others, but he himself has not been healed.  

Why did Jesus not heal this man?
For this man lame from birth, the Bible may give a clue in the name of the gate where he was placed.   The Greek word is ‘horaios,’ and the definition listed in Strong’s Greek Dictionary is “belonging to the right hour or season (timely), i.e. (by implication) flourishing (beauteous (figuratively)): — beautiful.”   It carries the idea of beauty due to its ‘ripeness,’ like a fruit ripens at a particular time or a flower blooms and is beautiful for just that moment.5  The writer of Ecclesiastes has that same idea:

Ecc. 3:11   He has made everything beautiful in its time. 

There is no record of a gate called “Beautiful” in any ancient document except in this section of Acts.  Therefore, we have no idea which gate they are referring to.  Perhaps it is because ‘beautiful’ is not the name of the gate but the situation.  This man was at the gate of ‘horaios, the right hour or season.’  It was the perfect time. And while he was hugging Peter and John, a stunned crowd gathers… and Peter preaches, and a thousand or more believe.  God had a purpose for that healing to happen at that exact chosen moment.  It was horaios – and it was beautiful. 

 I believe God will heal everyone one day.  One day, he will correct all wrong, cure all diseases, and bring about perfect justice.  Until then, we wait in a world full of sin and chaos for His promises to come.  We are told God will only give us good gifts.  It is hard to view horrible disease or death as good.  But we look through a glass darkly with our limited vision and understanding.  We also fail to see that our primary purpose in this world is not to live a carefree, uncomplicated life.  It is to bring glory to God.  Perhaps our illness or death will be the best way to fulfill that duty.  This is where we have to trust God.  He won’t ask us to suffer more than he asked Jesus to suffer.  The pain that Jesus endured was to bring glory to God and fulfill his will so that we may be saved.  But at the time, who could see that?  

So, how should we pray?  Most importantly, we should pray honestly.  If you study Psalms, you will see that the Psalmists are not afraid to express their deepest emotion to God, even if we might not think it is the “proper” way to speak to Yehovah.  We should, as the psalmist, pour our hearts out to God in requests for healing.  God knows your heart anyway.  But it is also acceptable to add to our heartfelt cry that we understand that God’s will may not be what we desire to happen and that we relinquish our will and ask Him to do His will.  This is how Jesus prayed in the garden.  “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will” (Matt 26.39).  This does not demonstrate a lack of faith to pray in this manner.  It was not for Jesus, and it is not for you.  In fact, it demonstrates your trust in God to vocalize your willingness to seek his will and not your own.

There is so much sickness, depression, and suffering in this world.  Many are waiting by the ‘beautiful gate’ for God’s perfect time for their healing; let it be now, or let it be in the world to come, but while we wait, let us seek wholeness, let us seek shalom.  Let us strive to be first in proper relationship with God and then in good relations with everyone.  And may our life give glory to the Father above in all we say and do.

  1. The Siloam pool, discussed in John 9, was rediscovered during excavation work for a sewer in the autumn of 2004.
  2. There is also a debate on whether the pool was built for ceremonial washing ( a mikvah) or was a pagan pool for the cult of Asclepius, or healing.  It was used as an Asclepion after the fall of Jerusalem, but I don’t think it was in the time of Jesus.  Certainly, Pharisees would not have been seen in such a pagan place.  Also, the steps are designed to function well as a mikvah.
  3. Good lesson.  Do what Jesus would do.  Just because someone’s theology seems wrong to you (even if you are right), sometimes you give them the help they need before you think about preaching to them.
  4. Paul, in Romans 12:18 says, “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.”  Some people refuse to be reconciled no matter how hard you try.  (Jesus definitely understands this.)
  5. Greek has several words for time. Chronos is the usual generic word for time and is the root for our word chronology and others. Kairos refers to a special or appointed time or season. When Jesus says, “My hour has come,” the word for ‘hour’ is ‘kairos’. ‘Horaios is a smaller window of time than Kairos, a sacred moment, and is only seen four times in the New Testament, two of them in this passage.  

May 18-24, 27 A.D.  The Nobleman’s Son- The Year of the Lord’s Favor #33

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , ,

Week 14 ———  The Nobleman’s Son
John 4:43-54

John 4:43   After the two days he departed for Galilee.  (For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown.)   So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast. For they too had gone to the feast.  

So he came again to Cana in Galilee, where he had made the water wine. And at Capernaum there was an official whose son was ill. When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and asked him to come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death. So Jesus said to him, “Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe.”  The official said to him, “Sir, come down before my child dies.” 50 Jesus said to him, “Go; your son will live.” The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way.   As he was going down, his servants met him and told him that his son was recovering.   So he asked them the hour when he began to get better, and they said to him, “Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him.”   The father knew that was the hour when Jesus had said to him, “Your son will live.” And he himself believed, and all his household.   This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.

So, after spending two days in Samaria, they continue to Galilee and, as before, pass through his hometown of Nazareth and on through Sepphoris to Cana.  Already, he is not well received in Nazareth, so his path goes through Nazareth, but he does not stop there.  He explained to his disciples that a “prophet has no honor in his hometown.”  (More to come in Nazareth later.)  

In Cana, he is met by an “official,” literally a ‘royal officer.’  This would be some official of Herod Antipas, the Tetrarch. Some have proposed he was Manaen, Herod’s foster brother, who is seen in Acts 13:1 as a member of the church in Antioch. Others suggest it was Chuza, the husband of Joanna, one of the women with Jesus and the disciples in Luke 8:3, who supported his ministry.

The official had heard of Jesus’ prior miracles and knew that he was coming from Judea, so he met him at Cana. He asks Jesus to “come down” to Capernaum (Capernaum is a lower altitude than Cana at the Sea of Galilee—up and down are more important when you are walking 20 miles).  His son is “at the point of death.”  “Asks” here may not express the intensity of the Greek.  This is the same word for ‘beg,’ and the tense is continuous – so “continuously begged Jesus to come down” is appropriate.  Jesus replies “to him” but speaks in the plural “you” twice in his response, so he is talking to everyone there. “Unless you [all] see signs and wonders you [all] will not believe.  “Signs and wonders” is John’s way of saying ‘miracles.’1  But the word for signs is the Greek word for ‘sign-post,’ and it better conveys that these miracles of Jesus are pointing to something.  Leon Morris, in the New International Commentary of the New Testament, says:

“It is plain that John uses “sign” in a distinctive fashion. For him the miracles were significant events. They set forth spiritual truths. We see this, not only in the meaning of this one word, but in the way John arranges his narratives. In them he exposes facet after facet of human need, showing at the same time human inadequacy and Jesus’ all-sufficiency. At Cana with the turning of the water into wine this concerns our inability to cope with the demands of those festivities that are normal to human life. In the case of the nobleman’s son and of the man lame for thirty-eight years it is our helplessness in the face of disease and of the tragedy of crippling physical disability. The feeding of the multitude shows up the barrenness of human resources even to supply necessary food (a lesson very much in place in the modern world), while Jesus’ walking on the water contrasts with human helplessness in the face of the awesome forces of nature unleashed in, for example, a great storm. The opening of the eyes of the blind man illustrates our failure to cope with innate handicaps while it also shows Jesus to be the light of the world. The raising of dead Lazarus underlines the ultimate human defeat by death while it reveals Jesus as the resurrection and the life. Each miracle is “sign”-ificant, meaningful.  Rightly considered it points people to God, and to God’s provision in Jesus. If people will only view the miracles as they should they will be led into deeper faith.” 

Jesus says, “Go; your son will live,” and the man departs. Verse 50 says, “The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way.”  The man only gets Jesus’ word, which is enough for him.  (Did you see that Gideon?)  We are told this happened at the seventh hour.  Remember, John uses the Jewish measure of time, not the Roman one that we are accustomed to, so the seventh hour would be seven hours after sunrise (~6 am), so our 1 pm.  He then begins his 20-mile journey to Capernaum.

He is met by his slaves, who tell him that his son is recovering. He inquires when he began to improve and is told, “Yesterday at the seventh hour.”  That ‘yesterday’ sounds odd to us, but remember that the day for the Jew begins around sunset (~6 pm).  

Jesus says ‘go’ and the man believes and goes.  He shares his belief and his whole household believes.  Note that belief is accompanied by action.  (From a Jewish perspective, belief without action is not belief at all.)  This is a good lesson for us.

  1. The Synoptic Gospels typically use the word “dunamis” for Jesus’ miracles, concentrating on the power of Jesus. (‘Dunamis’ is the basis for our word ‘dynamo’ or ‘dynamite.)
  2. Morris, Leon.  New International Commentary of the New Testament, “John”.

May 18-24, 27 A.D.  The Samaritan Woman at the Well- The Year of the Lord’s Favor #32

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , , ,

Week 14 ———  The Samaritan Woman at the Well
John 4:5-42

Several stories in the Bible begin with a man meeting a woman at a well. This setting is where Rebecca is found as a wife for Isaac, where Jacob meets his future wife Rachel, and where Moses meets Zipporah whom he will marry. All of these stories all end in marriage, but today’s story is different.

You have probably heard several sermons on this story.  I have, and they all pretty much go the same way:  The disgraced, sinful woman encounters Jesus, and he reveals her sin, and she comes to believe in him.

Here is a typical rendering, from ‘Got Questions Ministry’ “What we can learn from the woman at the well”:

“…she was an outcast and looked down upon by her own people. This is evidenced by the fact that she came alone to draw water from the community well when, during biblical times, drawing water and chatting at the well was the social highpoint of a woman’s day. However, this woman was ostracized and marked as immoral, an unmarried woman living openly with the sixth in a series of men. The story of the woman at the well teaches us that God loves us in spite of our bankrupt lives.”

And another traditional view from John Piper, in his sermon titled: ‘God Seeks People to Worship Him in Spirit and Truth’:

“If people are spiritually asleep, you have to shock them, startle them, scandalize them, if you want them to hear what you say. Jesus was especially good at this. When he wants to teach us something about worship, he uses a whore.”

That is the traditional interpretation.   Today I want to challenge that interpretation.

Forever this story has been read with the assumption that this woman was of ill repute.  One of my Hebrew teachers, Eli Lizorkin, wrote a book in 2015, on the gospel of John. In the chapter on John 4 he questions that presupposition.  Then this past week, I read a book by Caryn Reeder that focused on the problems with the traditional approach to this woman (and many other women in scripture.)

So, let’s take a new look at this story.

The location is Sycar, a village near Shechem, where Jacob’s well was. This was one of the first pieces of land in Israel owned by the Hebrews, and it is where Joseph’s bones were brought from Egypt to rest. 

Joshua 24:32   As for the bones of Joseph, which the people of Israel brought up from Egypt, they buried them at Shechem.

A divine appointment.

Jesus is waiting for her when she arrives at the well at an unusual time, noon.  Most people would have already made their daily trip for water in the morning. The suggestion is that she is intentionally avoiding others.  This had led pastors for centuries to say that she was a sinful woman, having been married multiple times and now living with a man out of wedlock.  These pastors describe her as shunned by her village.  This is a reasonable conclusion based on our modern culture.  But this story didn’t happen in our culture.  So let’s place the story back into its original setting.

Why all the marriages?   There are two ways marriages can end in Israel in the first-century culture: divorce or death.

In Jesus’ day, divorce was not uncommon, but only men could file for divorce, and they could do it for pretty much any reason.  This was a subject of much debate by the Pharisees of the day, and they questioned Jesus on his opinion in Matthew 19.1 One of the common reasons for divorce was that the woman could not bear a child.  There was no procedure for women to file for divorce.2  If divorced, a woman did not take anything from the marriage, including anything the husband had given them during the marriage.  They had the right to take the original dowery, but this often didn’t happen.  So many women left with almost nothing and no way to provide for their needs.   

Women in Jesus’ culture typically were married when they were 12 – 15 years old, and husbands were usually 10-15 years older.  With the state of medical care, accidents and illnesses would mean many would not live past their mid-30s.  As in divorce, if her husband died, the wife did not inherit anything from the husband’s estate; it all went to his heirs.  That included the family home.  She again only had the right to her dowery.  Often, this meant she had no place to live.  If she had an adult son, he might be able to care for her. Any younger children belonged to the husband’s family. So frequently, in a divorce or the death of a husband, the wife would lose almost everything, including her home and children.  

“The man you now have is not your husband.”  We jump to the conclusion (based on our prior assumption of her character) that she is living out of wedlock.  If she has had and lost five husbands, no matter the reason, she will unlikely marry again.  A single woman in this culture could not live on her own. Women who cannot marry seek refuge with some male relative who can help support them. She may be living with a relative or another man out of necessity.  We don’t know.3

One other thing has always bothered me about the traditional characterization of this woman.  If she was seen by her community as a ‘horrible non-repentant sinner’, how is it possible that she can run in the village bearing witness to the Messiah, and suddenly everyone follows her back to the well?  That seems unlikely.  If she, instead, was pitied by her community for her misfortune and depression, it is more reasonable that this sudden change of spirits would lead them to take the hike to the well to investigate. 

Given this culture and these uncertainties, you can certainly not jump to the conclusion that she is a sinful woman. How odd is it that sermons on this story seem to always focus on her sin when sin is never mentioned in Jesus’ conversation with the woman?   Jesus doesn’t identify her relationships as sinful, nor does he offer her forgiveness. Jesus does not ask her to repent or change her life. Elsewhere in the Gospel of John, we see Jesus freely discussing sin — the woman caught in adultery is told to “go and sin no more”.  He tells the paralytic, “Your sins are forgiven.”  But the omission of any mention of sin here is striking.4

Remember, this is a shame/honor culture.  If you have read much of the Old Testament, you understand the shame of a woman who is not married and the even worse shame of a woman who can not bear children.  Whether this Samaritan woman is at fault for her prior relationships or not, her position is the same.  She lives in shame in her community, from either their accusations or their pity.  It seems Jesus doesn’t focus on why she is living as she is.  His concern is not who is at fault.  He looks past the blame and sees a hurting woman he can help.

How unlike Jesus we can be.  We are very quick to decide if we are willing to help people based on how much they deserve our help.  We are much more likely to support an innocent victim than we are someone whose bad behavior got them into a mess.  We have seen this over and over in our homeless ministry.  A father loses his job, and his family with three young children finds themselves homeless.  People rush in to help.  We get more offers for help for them than we can handle.  But a young man comes in the same day who made bad decisions and became involved with drugs and lost his home — that rush of offers never comes.  He sees the response that the churches have to the family with kids while he is ignored.  What does he learn about the church?  Some people deserve grace, and some people do not.  That is a poor reflection of Jesus.

People say, “He got what he deserved.”  That is a very common response.  But is it a Christ-like response?   One of my friends said about the young man, “He made his bed, now he has to sleep in it.”  How ironic. The problem is that right now he doesn’t have a bed to sleep in or a place to put one.  He may be at fault, but he is also in need.

We often reserve our mercy and grace for those we deem worthy. But aren’t we grateful that Jesus dispenses grace and mercy freely, even when we don’t deserve it? None of us can earn God’s grace through our actions. Isn’t it a comfort to know that Jesus offers grace unconditionally? I don’t know anyone who wants to stand in front of God at judgment and ask to be given what they deserve.

As we discussed last week, Jesus went out of his way to meet this woman. He drags his disciples down what they feel is a wrong and dangerous path to have this one encounter. They do not see these Samaritans as worthy of their attention or God’s love. But Jesus comes to bring her hope, healing, and salvation.

But first, he has to break through some problematic barriers.   Remember, the Samaritans and Jews are bitter enemies with a long history of strife.  No Jew would share a meal with a Samaritan or drink from a Samaritan’s vessel.  Remember the quote from the Mishna:

Mishna Shebiith 8:10  “He that eats the bread of the Samaritans is like to one that eats the flesh of swine.”

Jesus starts the conversation by asking her for water, breaking any expectations she might have had about this Jew.   He then turns the conversation to ‘living water’, which he can offer her.  She initially does not understand this concept.5  Jesus then reveals himself as a prophet, and she responds by asking him the critical question regarding worship for a Samaritan.  Where is the proper place to worship?  Remember, the Samaritans had been, at times, not allowed to participate in temple worship in Jerusalem.  They had built their temple on Mt Gerizim, which the Jews had destroyed around 130 years before this encounter.  So there is no temple for her to worship in.  And this woman could not go to the Jerusalem temple due to racial strife.  But even if she could, she would have been restricted to the outer court, the “Women’s Court” simply because she was a woman. Women had a lower place in the religious culture of Jesus’ day.  This was not God’s idea.  There is no Biblical command for a court of women in the Tabernacle or the Temple.  It is an invention of the culture of men.  Sadly, some religions still refuse to admit women to certain areas of the church just because they are women.  Further, this woman would have a hard time even going to the local synagogue because of her shame.  

So she asks, where is the proper place to worship?  This is an important question that we still fail to grasp today.  Jesus tells her that salvation comes through the Jews, but now worship can happen anywhere and has no racial restrictions. God is to be worshiped in spirit and truth. Jesus tells her that the day is here, that the location won’t matter, and that she will have full access to God. Can you imagine what this would mean to her?

It is not about where.  Not this mountain or that mountain.  Not this temple or that temple.  Not this church or that church.  It is not about methods.  Not this denomination or that denomination.  Not with this style of music or that.  Worship is our response to the awe and wonder of a mighty God.  The Hebrew word for worship is avad which is also the word for work.  Worship is not simply a state of mind; it is doing the work that God demands. We call the church building a place of worship.  If this is the only place you worship, then you don’t comprehend what Jesus said to this woman.  What Jesus is saying is that place doesn’t matter.  The place of worship is anywhere the spirit is.  Anywhere you go is a place of worship.  Your occupation, your home, your grocery store, your friend’s house – these are all places of worship.  Worship is what we do every day of the week as we walk in obedience to him. We call this a worship service. Do you see that?  Service is the work a servant does. But the community worship we do for one hour on Sunday morning is just a tiny part of our week.  The other 167 hours in the week we worship as we walk with God and do his work.  We do not work to earn salvation. We do the work of God because that is our way to worship every day of our lives.  Jesus said we show our love for him by following his commandments.  Worship is doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with God.  (Micah 6:8)

This is all too good for her to believe, even coming from a prophet.  ‘That’s nice, Mr. Prophet, but only the Messiah can reveal that truth when he comes.’6  And that is when Jesus tells her he is the Messiah.  She is the first person he reveals himself to.  And now she knows what is too good to be true — it has just become true.  She drops her water jars and runs into town.

Then Jesus speaks with his disciples an often quoted verse:

“Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.”  John 4:35

Do you understand the significance of the placement of this verse right here in this story?   Jesus speaks of a field ready for harvest, and then verse 41 tells us: “And many more believed because of his word.”  The field Jesus is talking about is a field that the disciples would have never considered to be their responsibility to harvest, never considered to be capable of harvest.  This was a field of enemies.  A field full of hated people.  They were people who had polluted their worship and were unclean.  But not to Jesus.  

We can not set limits on God’s view of the harvest.

Do you see the trouble Jesus has gone through to teach the disciples and us this lesson?

God’s original plan was for the Jews to be his kingdom of priests to carry his message to the whole world.  But they were not obedient to this plan.  Their view of God’s kingdom was too small.  Samaritans part of the Kingdom?  No way. We don’t even talk to them, we don’t drink from their water jars, and we don’t allow them to come to our temple.  They are our enemies.  A woman?  Are you serious?  We keep them in the outer courts.7  Now a Samaritan woman who is living in shame?  She is probably a horrible sinner.  She has no place in God’s harvest.

But Jesus says, “Yes!”  Samaritan’s? “Yes!”  Enemies? “Yes!”  Women? “Yes!”  Sinners? “Yes!”

How big is your view of God’s kingdom?  Is it for the poor, is it for the prisoner, is it for the Hamas member, is it for your neighbor who is rude or mean, Is it for the people who are public sinners as well as those who we pity?  This woman dropped everything and ran to tell people about the Messiah.  And here we sit, clutching our water pots.

  1. Note that Jesus in Matthew 19 is not giving an exhaustive teaching on divorce, but answering a specific question.
  2. An exception is that the very wealthy or highly politically connected women could, in certain situations file for divorce.
  3. Caryn Reeder notes in her book, The Samaritan Woman’s Story: Reconsidering John 4 After #ChurchToo, “The characterization of the Samaritan woman as an adulterer or prostitute exemplifies the dehumanizing, reductive sexualization of women in the theology and practice of the church. This pattern of interpretation endlessly repeats: Deborah and Jael, Bathsheba, Mary Magdalene, the woman who anoints Jesus in Luke 7: 36-50. These women (among many others) are categorized and defined on the basis of gender and sexuality.”
  4. And the centuries of male-dominated church leaders’ insistence on proclaiming the sin of this woman is even more striking.
  5. It is interesting to compare this one-on-one conversation with Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus in the previous chapter.   Nicodemus is a leader of the Jews, a great teacher, and held in high esteem by the community.  She is of the lowest social status.  She is not even given a name.  She encounters Jesus in the middle of the day while Nicodemus comes at night, and Jesus says a lot to him about the light and the dark. They both initially have trouble understanding Jesus’ symbolism (born again, living water.)  But in a surprising twist, Nicodemus says little in his conversation with Jesus, while this woman holds her own.  And this unnamed Samaritan woman becomes the model for us to believe and witness, not the great Pharisee, Nicodemus.
  6. Since the Samaritans only had the first five books of the Bible, their primary prophecy on the Messiah was Deuteronomy 18:18 which refers to a prophet like Moses that will come and speak the very words of God.
  7. “It is frighteningly easy for a woman in the church to absorb a message that she is lesser, inferior, and lacking in some way.”  Lucy Peppiatt, in Recovering Scripture’s Vision for Women.

May 17-24, 27 A.D.  Jesus must go through Samaria- The Year of the Lord’s Favor #31

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , ,

Week 14 ———  Jesus had to pass through Samaria
John 4:1-4

Recap:
Jesus was baptized on Feb 16 and spent 40 days in the wilderness.  The satan tempted him on March 28.  Then he returned to the area where John was baptizing, and John said, “Behold the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world.”  They travel north to Galilee, where he turns the water into wine at Cana.  Then he travels south to Jerusalem for the feast of Passover.  He throws the money changers out of the temple on April 10, has Passover on April 11, and then speaks with Nicodemus on April 12.  He leaves after the week of Unleavened Bread, and his disciples are baptizing in Judea.  When he begins to be noticed by the Pharisees, he decides to head north back to Galilee. 

Why did Jesus have to pass through Samaria?

If you were going north to Galilee in Jesus’s day, you had three choices: The most direct route was to head north and go through Samaria. This is the fastest way, but the Jews rarely used it because travel through Samaria was dangerous. So most chose to go east across the Jordan and then north before crossing the Jordan again near Beth Shean or Jezreel.  The western route was even more difficult.

I want you to take two minutes to watch this clip from “The Chosen.”  I am usually impressed at the series’s effort to try to be culturally and historically accurate.  They portray Jesus’ journey with the disciples as he decides to go through Samaria (much to their surprise.)  There are two minor disagreements with the Scripture in this episode.  First, they have somewhat placed this story out of order — note in the clip that Jesus has already called most of the disciples.  Secondly, they are traveling in the opposite direction from the Biblical account (north from Judea to Galilee in Bible and south from Galilee in the clip).  Nevertheless, I feel that the disciples’ response to Jesus’ decision to take the journey through Samaria is so well done that this has become one of my favorite scenes in the series.

John tells us “he had to pass through Samaria”  without explaining why. We only have one story on this journey: the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. So, we must assume this is his divine appointment. Next week, we will look at that encounter, but to understand this story, we must understand the conflict between the Jews and the Samaritans. Where did they come from?

The History Lesson

Around 1000 BC, David became king over all of Israel, and when he died, his son, Solomon, became king, and the land reached the peak of its prosperity.  Solomon dies in 931 BC, and there is a struggle for control. His son, Rehoboam, makes very poor decisions, and the kingdom splits.  Ten tribes in the North became known as ‘Israel’ (yes, a little confusing, sorry).  The capital of Israel was established in Samaria, with Jeroboam as their king.  The tribes of Judah and Benjamin in the South became known as ‘Judah’ with their capital remaining in Jerusalem and Rehoboam as their king.  Jeroboam’s first act in the North was establishing areas for worship in Bethel and Dan (so Israel wouldn’t have to travel back to Jerusalem to worship.)

1 Kings 12:26-29    And Jeroboam said in his heart, “Now the kingdom will turn back to the house of David.   If this people go up to offer sacrifices in the temple of the LORD at Jerusalem, then the heart of this people will turn again to their lord, to Rehoboam king of Judah, and they will kill me and return to Rehoboam king of Judah.”   So the king took counsel and made two calves of gold. And he said to the people, “You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.”    And he set one in Bethel, and the other he put in Dan.

Things started badly for the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and they got worse until God sent Assyria to sack Israel in 722 BC. Assyria’s method of controlling its conquered countries was to export the leaders and a percentage of the population and then bring in people from other conquered nations to cause the people to lose their distinctiveness and be less likely to rebel.

2 Kings 17:24   And the king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the people of Israel. And they took possession of Samaria and lived in its cities. 

The Assyrians (in the Annals of Sargon II) claimed to have deported 27,290 people, but it is currently thought that only about 10% of the population of the northern kingdom was deported, and only about 1000 people were brought into the country from beyond.  So, there was less of an influx of foreign people than previously thought.  This is important because one of the reasons the Jews in Judah disliked the Samaritans was that they maintained the Samaritans were people who broke God’s laws about intermarriage; they called them half-breeds. The Samaritans maintained they were descendants from the tribes of Levi, Ephraim, and Manasseh (Joseph), who were not deported to Assyria.  While the Bible mentions the influx of foreigners, I can’t find any Biblical reference to their intermarriage.1  2 Kings 17:29ff discusses the foreign idols placed in the land, but the transplanted people place these, not the people originally from the Northern Kingdom who the Assyrians did not carry away.  “But every nation still made gods of its own and put them in the shrines of the high places that the Samaritans had made, every nation in the cities in which they lived.” (2 Kings 17:29).  There are around 900 Samaritans today, with most living in Nablus which is in the location of the ancient city of Samaria.  Interestingly, genetic studies were done in the past 25 years that support the Samaritans’ claim of their pure ancestry, refuting the once-held claims of the Jews in the Southern Kingdom.  

One hundred thirty-six years after the Northern Kingdom was decimated, Babylon conquered Judah, and Jerusalem and the temple were destroyed. Babylon had a different policy of controlling conquered nations. They exported most people from the land, leaving only a few very poor.  So Judah was exiled in Babylon for 70 years.  Persia conquered Babylon and allowed all those captives to return to their homes.  

When the exiles returned, they began rebuilding the temple. Some of the people who had already lived in the land offered to help, but they were refused.

Ezra 4:1   Now when the adversaries of Judah and Benjamin heard that the returned exiles were building a temple to the LORD, the God of Israel,  they approached Zerubbabel and the heads of fathers’ houses and said to them, “Let us build with you, for we worship your God as you do, and we have been sacrificing to him ever since the days of Esarhaddon king of Assyria who brought us here.”  But Zerubbabel, Jeshua, and the rest of the heads of fathers’ houses in Israel said to them, “You have nothing to do with us in building a house to our God; but we alone will build to the LORD, the God of Israel, las King Cyrus the king of Persia has commanded us.” 

These were likely not Samaritans, as these people say the king of Assyria ‘brought them here.’  They are the imported people from the nations listed in 2 Kings 17:24.  But at this point, the people of Judah have refused to see any difference between the Jews who were not taken and the Gentiles who were brought in.  They lump them all together. (As do many people who discuss this time in history.)

The final separation between the Jews of Judah and the Samaritans comes when Nehemiah discovers that a grandson of the high priest, Eliashib, had married a daughter of Sanballat, the governor of the province of Samaria.  Since Nehemiah saw her as ‘non-Jewish,’ he felt the priesthood had been defiled and drove the high priest out of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 13:28-29). According to the historian Josephus, Sanballat then built a temple on Mount Gerizim where this exiled priest could function.

And then things get even worse.

After Alexander the Great died, his kingdom was divided among three generals.  The Seleucid leader Antiochus Epiphanes persecuted the Jews. He desecrated the temple and altar, leading to a rebellion and the Maccabean Wars in the 2nd century BC. The Jews in Judah asked the Samaritans for help fighting off the Selucids. However, they refused and aligned with the Selucids fighting against Judah. After Judah prevailed, in 108 BC, they went to Mt Gerizim and destroyed the Samaritan’s temple in retribution.  The Samaritans finally struck back in 6 AD and sneaked into the Jerusalem temple at night and scattered human bones around, defiling the temple and ruining the Passover celebration.

A few quotes from literature from that time further reveal the animosity:

The Wisdom of Ben Sirach 50:25-26  (ca. 200 BC)  “There are two nations my soul detests, the third is not a nation at all; the inhabitants of Mt Seir (the Edomites), the Philistines, and the stupid people living at Shechem.

Mishna Shebiith 8:10  “He that eats the bread of the Samaritans is like to one that eats the flesh of swine.”

Finally, there is the story in Luke 9:51-56 where Jesus is again traveling through Samaria to the Feast of Tabernacles.  One of the Samaritan villages would not receive him, because he was a Jew headed to Jerusalem, so James and John ask Jesus “Lord, do you want us to tell fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” (Luke 9:54).  Jesus rebuked them and traveled on.2  The Hatfields and the McCoys had nothing on the Jews and the Samaritans.  

Samaritans were not just social outcasts — they were the enemy, the most hated people on the planet by Jews in Jesus’ day.  When Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” the people they would have pictured as enemies were Samaritans.  (Incidentally, who do you think about if you hear “Love your enemies”?)

Jesus had to pass through Samaria. He had a divine appointment. He will not miss this appointment, even if it means taking a more difficult journey that no one wants to take. He takes the path less taken only to have a meeting with this one woman. The woman we will see next week was isolated, lonely, and ignored by her community. In all of Samaria, he considers this one woman. And that conversation with one woman will lead to many believing in him.

Jesus had the ability to see the one among the many. In the Gospels, he saw a funeral procession with many mourners, yet he focused on one grieving woman. Amidst a crowd, he noticed the one woman in need who touched the hem of his garment. Walking through a busy market, he saw one tax collector and stopped to invite Matthew to follow him. Jesus saw the one who needed him most.  

“The God who sees”

Hagar is an Egyptian who is given to Abraham’s wife, Sarah, as a handmaiden.  She is mistreated and forced into the wilderness.  There, God finds her and gives her comfort and encouragement.  She calls him ‘El Roi’, the God who sees.   If you have ever felt lonely in a crowd, hopeless, or isolated, if you think the whole world is against you — God sees you, loves you, and looks out for you.  Like Hagar, he may not change your circumstances but will change you so you can bear them.

Sometimes, it is easier to see the many instead of the one.

It is easy to see the many and say they need help. It is easy to see the TV advertisement with starving children and say, “Let’s donate to help the children in Africa.”  It is not difficult to drop off some food at the local food pantry to help the hungry in our town, take some clothes to the Salvation Army, or go to a charity dinner to help single mothers. These are all good things, but that is not how Jesus did ministry.  Jesus spent more time talking to individuals than he did preaching to crowds.

Jesus was all about reaching out and making relationships, especially with those left out by society — look at who he worked with:  the hated people like Samaritans, tax collectors, prostitutes, zealots, the poor, and lepers — people no one would put on their dinner invitation list.   Can we just for a moment think about who Jesus ministered to and then look at our lives and see if we are following Jesus?

Did you notice in the clip that the disciples were ahead of Jesus, looking at a map? It is hard to follow someone if you are walking in front of them. The disciples were goal-oriented. They knew their final destination and were headed there with blinders on. They would never consider going to Samaria, calling a tax collector, touching a leper, or making a prostitute a disciple. At the end of the clip, Jesus steps ahead and says again, “Follow me.”

There are so many people left out—so many needs.  And again, we need to, like Jesus, focus on not the many but the one.

Mother Teresa worked for six decades among the desperate and hopeless streets of the extremely poor in Calcutta, India. When asked how she was not overwhelmed by the crowds in need around her, she said,  “I don’t see crowds; I see individuals.”

On my first trip to Guatemala to do medical missions, we woke up early and drove up the side of a volcano to a village where the missionary told people to gather for free medical care. As we wound up that road, we began to pass people standing in a line that stretched for what seemed like miles. I asked our missionary, “What are those people in line for?”  He turned around and grinned and replied, “To see you.”  That day, I was overwhelmed by the crowd of sick children.  Then, I got some of the best advice I had ever received in my medical career.  “You will see hundreds of children today.  The needs will be great, and you will not be able to meet them all.  Do not see the hundreds. See the one.  The only one that matters is the one in front of you at the moment.  Give your all to that one.”  

There is a well-known parable I like to share with people as we depart for mission trips.  A man was walking on the beach early one morning.  He was the only one out that early, except for a boy he could see far in the distance.  As he walked further, he saw the little boy throwing something into the ocean.  As he got closer, he saw that the tide had washed up thousands of starfish on the beach.  They were drying out in the morning sun, but the little boy threw one after another back into the water.  The man said, “Hey, kid, there are thousands of starfish washed up.  Stop wasting your time.   You can’t possibly make a difference.  The little boy picked up another starfish and threw it as far as he could into the ocean and then replied to the man, “It made a difference to that one.”

Do you see the many, or do you see the one?

Later in his ministry, a Bible scholar will ask Jesus a question that Jesus answers by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan. The question was, “Who is my neighbor?”  The answer was “The one who saw to the needs of another.”  It is easy to say everyone is my neighbor.  But you can’t meet “everyone’s” needs.  Who is your neighbor?  Do you know the people who live around you?  Do they have needs?  You can’t meet everyone’s needs, but you can meet someone’s needs.  We need to follow Jesus’ lead and see the one, make relationships, and share the love of God. There are divine appointments out there for each of us.

Let me close this by sharing one of my divine appointments.

It had been a tough week.  That Monday, I saw a very sick 10-day-old baby and sent her by ambulance to Children’s Hospital.  She ended up that evening in the ICU, and I was told she was stable.  She died the following day.  I had tried to reach out to the family and share my condolences and offer support, but the phone number and address we had were not good.  I was on-call that weekend and had finished my hospital rounds on the babies and sick kids by noon.  I was just ready to go home and forget the week.  I stopped for gas on the way home and was headed in to pay (because, of course, the pay-at-the-pump was broken.)  A rough-looking man was sitting on the curb near the door, and I got the message from God that I needed to talk to him.  Begrudgingly, I did.  We talked a bit, and I discovered he had hitchhiked over 400 miles in the past several days.  He was headed to Guntersville, where I was headed.  I offered to take him there.  On the way, I asked him what brought him to our little town.  He teared up and said he was coming for the funeral of his 2-week-old granddaughter, whom he never got to see.  Sure enough, it was the baby I had seen.  So, God enabled me to reach out to this family in a way I could not have imagined.  After leaving their house, I had to repent of my poor attitude, my reluctance to listen, and all the other times I had ignored the Holy Spirit when I was so focused on going where I wanted to go.

Let me challenge you this week to see beyond the many and see the one.  God has a divine appointment for you.  Don’t miss it.

And let me ask you to do one more thing: Please share your own story of your divine appointment. I would love it if several of you posted your story as a comment on this blog. It will bless us all.  

Thanks.  

  1. I could not find any scriptural evidence for the common belief that there was a large amount of intermarriage between the Israelites not taken by Assyria and the imported people. If you know if a reference, please let me know.
  2. Jesus rebukes James and John for their continued animosity towards the Samaritans. Perhaps this is part of the reason Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan in the following chapter in Luke.

May 11-18, 27 A.D.    – The Year of the Lord’s Favor #30

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog ,

Week 13   Jesus has the Spirit without measure.
John 3:25-30

Last time, we talked about John the Baptist’s attitude. His disciples came to him worried because Jesus’ disciples were baptizing more. John said that is the way it is supposed to be. I am not worthy to untie his sandals. It is not about us. We are here to introduce Jesus. “He must increase, and I must decrease.”  We continue today with John’s discussion with his disciples as he tells them why it is all about Jesus.  There is a lot here to unpack.  What is so special about Jesus?

John 3:31-36   He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks in an earthly way.  He who comes from heaven is above all.  He bears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives his testimony. Whoever receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true. For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.  Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.

John says Jesus is above all.  He says it twice for emphasis.  And John is not even aware of all of Jesus’ story.  He knows that Jesus is the expected Messiah, but there is much there that John does not know at this time.   He did not have the advantage Paul had to look back on the whole ministry of Jesus.  Paul expressed these thoughts on the supremacy of Jesus:

Col. 1:15-20   He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by him, all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.   And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.   And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent.   For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

John simply said that Jesus is ‘above all’. John contrasts with himself, being ‘of earth’ who can only speak in an ‘earthly way’, while Jesus, who comes from ‘above’, can talk about what he has seen and experienced in the presence of the Father. Sadly, John says that few receive the eyewitness testimony that Jesus brings.  

“For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure.”

Some versions make the pronouns challenging to resolve, but “he whom God has sent” is Jesus.  And Jesus “utters the words of God” because God gives Jesus the “Spirit without measure.”  Why does John say Jesus is given the Spirit with no limit?  To understand this, we must understand what John and the other disciples of Jesus knew about the Holy Spirit.  

But first a Bible trivia question:
When is the first time we see the Holy Spirit in the Bible?   (No peeking.)

The Spirit appears in the third sentence of the Bible.  

“And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”  

That Hebrew word for “hovering” is used in the Old Testament to describe how a bird hovers or flutters.  You have seen a bird ‘hovering’ over their nest as they land there to care for their young.  The Holy Spirit is pictured this way in creation.  The Hebrew word for the Spirit is ‘ruach.’  Ruach can be translated as “Spirit,” “wind,” or “breath.”  Why did the Hebrews devise these multiple uses for the word thousands of years ago?

If you look outside when a storm is coming, you will see the trees moving.  But you know trees are inanimate objects.  They don’t move by themselves.  So then, Hebrew person 4000 years ago, what moves them? It is something you can not see.  There is an invisible energy that animates them. They called it the Ruach.  It is the force of creation.  It animates the trees, and it animates us. 

We are described in Genesis 3:19 as dust.  I remember reading long ago that if our bodies were broken down into their basic chemicals, we were only worth about $1.98.  You’ll be glad to know inflation has made our bodies worth more.   Wired magazine noted in 2003 that your body contains $7.12 worth of phosphorous, $5.95 worth of potassium, and about four dollars worth of other substances for a total of $17.18.1 And now, 21 years later, we could top out over $25.  (If you plan on selling out, note that this does not include the cost of extracting these chemicals.)

But the Bible tells us we are more than dust — we are dust and spirit.

Then Yehovah God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the ruach of life, and the man became a living creature.   Genesis 2:7

God took dust and gave it ruach, His breath, his Spirit on loan to us giving us life.  Have you witnessed the birth of a baby?  When a baby emerges from the womb, it is quiet and motionless.  As a pediatrician, I have seen this moment of anxiety many times.  Then, the baby takes that first breath. Lungs that have been filled with fluid for nine months are suddenly filled with air, and there is a cry, and the baby begins to move, arching its back and stretching its arms and legs. To someone thousands of years ago, not versed in modern science, breath is seen as animating.  Have you ever witnessed death?  When someone dies, the final act is that last exhalation of breath.  The breath leaves their body and, with it, life. 

This is how the ancient Hebrews came to use the word, ruach, for wind, spirit, and breath.  Yehovah’s Holy Spirit is the source of all life and is instrumental in all creation.  The second thing we see the Holy Spirit do is enter people to empower them with abilities to perform a specific task.

So here is another Bible trivia question:  Who is the first person filled with the Spirit in the Bible? 

The answer is Joseph, and oddly, the first person to recognize the filling of the Spirit is the Pharaoh of Egypt.

Genesis 41:38  And Pharaoh said to his servants, “Can we find a man like this, in whom is the Spirit of God?

We see an important concept here: the world notices the difference when God’s Spirit is present.  When God’s Holy Spirit comes on a person in power, the world can’t help but notice.

Joseph is given insight that he could not have known by himself.  He is given inspiration from the Holy Spirit.  Divine inspiration.  Don’t you find it interesting that inspiration is a word for breathing?  To inspire is to take in a breath.  The ruach of God is breathed into Joseph, and he is given supernatural insight to interpret Pharaoh’s dream, predicting the years of plenty and the years of famine.

Bezalel is another example of an Old Testament character given the Holy Spirit as a special gifting for a particular purpose.

Exodus 31:1-3   Now the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “See, I have called by name Bezalel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. I have filled him with the Spirit of God in wisdom, in understanding, in knowledge, and in all kinds of craftsmanship…

Bezalel is empowered by the Holy Spirit with the creative ability to produce the elaborate craftsmanship in the Tabernacle, including the ark of the covenant, lamp stands, and other furnishings.

The Spirit also filled the prophets in the Old Testament.

Micah  3:8  But as for me, I am filled with power, with the Spirit of Yehovah, and with justice and might, to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin.

This is the same language John the Baptist used to describe Jesus.  Jesus can speak the very words of God because he is given the Holy Spirit without measure.  The prophets had foretold this time when one would come with a different filling of the spirit. 

Isaiah 11:1-2 There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch from his roots shall bear fruit. And the Spirit of Yehovah shall rest upon him, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of Yehovah.

In this Messianic prophecy, Isaiah saw that God was going to do something different. When we see the Holy Spirit come on people in the Old Testament, it typically comes on for a season, for a specific task. But this Messiah that Isaiah is predicting will have the Spirit rest on him.  He will be not just ‘clothed’ with the Spirit for a specific time or function but filled with the Spirit that would remain on him.  

And Joel saw a time  when the spirit would be poured out on not just a very few, but on everyone,

Joel 2:28-29  And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh; your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. Even on the male and female servants in those days I will pour out my Spirit.

Joel is saying, listen, isn’t it amazing when God gives his Spirit to a prophet?  It happens once or twice in a hundred years.  Can you imagine what will happen when God pours out his Spirit on everyone?  What a difference that will make in the world.

So we move into the New Testament, where we see the Greek word pneuma. Interestingly, pneuma can also be used for wind, spirit, or breath. (You can see the root of our words pneumatic, pneumonia, pneumothorax, etc.) The Spirit performs the task of creation and empowers people with supernatural abilities, and you also see the Spirit in the word of re-creation.

After hundreds of years of waiting, the Messiah comes, and the Bible makes it clear that the incarnation of Jesus is the work of the Holy Spirit.

Matthew 1:20   “…do not fear to take Mary as your wife, for that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.”

Several weeks ago, we discussed the Spirit descending on Jesus after his baptism.  Isaiah had pleaded with God to tear open the heavens and come down. 

Isaiah 64:1  Oh, that You would tear open the heavens and come down.

And that is how Mark described the scene: “And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open” (Mark 1:10).  The spirit is described as descending “like a dove” reminiscent of the Holy Spirit ‘hovering” like a bird over creation.  And it comes “to rest on him” just as Isaiah had predicted.  God is doing something new.  The Messiah is given the Holy Spirit without measure. Jesus is being empowered for a mission.  The gospel writers (especially Luke) carefully note the Spirit’s presence with Jesus throughout his ministry.  

Next, we see the Holy Spirit in the work of re-creation, raising Jesus from death to life.  

Romans 1:4  [Jesus] was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead.

And then on the day of his resurrection we have this story:

John 20:19-22   On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.  Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Jesus is setting the disciples aside for a mission to lead the church and breathes on them.  Now, that would seem odd for Jesus to do if you don’t understand the concept of the ruach of God.  The breath of God, breathed into man in Genesis, is now breathed into these men as the Holy Spirit empowers them for their mission.  But we are not done. The prophet Joel saw that God was going to give the Holy Spirit to everyone, not just to a few. So we turn to Acts 2, where 120 are gathered.

Acts 2:1-4   When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.

They spoke the words of God because they were filled with the Spirit.  God’s Spirit makes a difference that the world can not ignore.  This is what Joel predicted.  The spirit is poured out on all who believe.  In the Book of Acts and the rest of the New Testament, we see that people believe in God and receive the spirit of God—everyone who believes.  And the Spirit makes a difference in their lives.

In Galatians 5, Paul discusses the work of the Spirit in believers’ lives.

Gal. 5:22-25   But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.   And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit.

The spirit can make a difference in our lives if we allow it. We must follow and stay in step.  We all get out of step with the Spirit. I do. That old man rises up, and I say something stupid.  We have to follow the Spirit within us, not ignore it.  We can’t afford to ignore the spirit.  We can’t just continue trying to do what God wants us to do in our own power.  We can not be who God wants us to be if we are not in step with God’s spirit.

Francis Chan calls the Holy Spirit “The Forgotten God”.

“You might think that calling the Holy Spirit the “forgotten God” is a bit extreme. Maybe you agree that the church has focused too much attention elsewhere but feel it is an exaggeration to say we have forgotten about the Spirit. I don’t think so. From my perspective, the Holy Spirit is tragically neglected and, for all practical purposes, forgotten. While no evangelical would deny His existence, I’m willing to bet there are millions of churchgoers across America who cannot confidently say they have experienced His presence or action in their lives over the past year. And many of them do not believe they can. The benchmark of success in church services has become more about attendance than the movement of the Holy Spirit. The “entertainment” model of church was largely adopted in the 1980s and ’90s, and while it alleviated some of our boredom for a couple of hours a week, it filled our churches with self-focused consumers rather than self-sacrificing servants attuned to the Holy Spirit. Perhaps we’re too familiar and comfortable with the current state of the church to feel the weight of the problem. But what if you grew up on a desert island with nothing but the Bible to read? Imagine being rescued after twenty years and then attending a typical evangelical church. Chances are you’d be shocked (for a whole lot of reasons, but that is another story). Having read the Scriptures outside the context of contemporary church culture, you would be convinced that the Holy Spirit is as essential to a believer’s existence as air is to staying alive. You would know that the Spirit led the first Christians to do unexplainable things, to live lives that didn’t make sense to the culture around them, and ultimately to spread the story of God’s grace around the world. There is a big gap between what we read in Scripture about the Holy Spirit and how most believers and churches operate today. In many modern churches, you would be stunned by the apparent absence of the Spirit in any manifest way. And this, I believe, is the crux of the problem. If I were Satan and my ultimate goal was to thwart God’s kingdom and purposes, one of my main strategies would be to get churchgoers to ignore the Holy Spirit. The degree to which this has happened (and I would argue that it is a prolific disease in the body of Christ) is directly connected to the dissatisfaction most of us feel with and in the church. We understand something very important is missing. The feeling is so strong that some have run away from the church and God’s Word completely. I believe that this missing something is actually a missing Someone-namely, the Holy Spirit. Without Him, people operate in their own strength and only accomplish human-size results. The world is not moved by love or actions that are of human creation. And the church is not empowered to live differently from any other gathering of people without the Holy Spirit. But when believers live in the power of the Spirit, the evidence in their lives is supernatural. The church cannot help but be different, and the world cannot help but notice.”2

I was talking with a worship leader in a large church and asked him why the music had to be so loud. (As a pediatrician, I was concerned when the decibel level of our service was consistently over the level that can cause permanent hearing damage, especially to children.)  Why does it have to be jackhammer-level?  He said it gives a lot of energy to the service and gets people excited and involved in the worship.  And I am thinking…isn’t that what the Holy Spirit does?  So, is our entertainment-style worship with rock concert-level music and flashing lights necessary because we no longer involve the Holy Spirit?  

We can create a church service that people can enjoy. We can have professional-quality musicians, lighting, sound systems, great preaching, and wonderful programs. When people leave the service, they may talk about how good the musicians were, how good the preacher was, or how nice the people were, but they won’t leave talking about how good God is. They won’t leave inspired to worship God throughout the week or leave in awe of God. And isn’t that the reason we are here?  

We are living in difficult times.  We need the Holy Spirit to be active in our lives and churches.  We have people around us facing terrible diseases with difficult prognoses.  We have people in our communities dying without Jesus.  We can not afford to be who we were yesterday when God has so much more for us.  We need to be in step with the Spirit.  Will you join me in praying for God to move among us?

  1. Di Justo, Patrick.  Wired Magazine 2003.
  2. Chan, Francis.  Forgotten God (2009). Kindle location 44.

April 28-May 4, 27 A.D.  The Attitude of John the Baptist- The Year of the Lord’s Favor #29

David Chupp The 70 Weeks with Jesus Blog , ,

Week 11 ———  The Attitude of John the Baptist
John 3:25-30

We continue to follow Jesus’ 70-week ministry. He was baptized on February 16, went into the wilderness for 40 days, returned to be with John the Baptist, and then headed into the Galilee. He went to a wedding in Cana, performed miracles, and then headed down to Jerusalem for Passover. He had a conversation with Nicodemus. He celebrated Firstfruits and the Feast of Unleavened Bread.

John 3:25   Now a discussion arose between some of John’s disciples and a Jewish leader over purification. And they came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, he who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness—look, he is baptizing, and all are going to him.” John answered, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’  The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease.”

There arose a discussion, more literally a debate, between John’s disciples and a Pharisee.  They were debating about purification, a topic often discussed among religious leaders at the time.  Remember that debate was the usual form of discussion and teaching of the day.  We have no reason to believe this was a heated argument.  But at some point, the idea that the number of people coming to hear their rabbi, John the Baptist, was dwindling.  John had been seeing huge crowds come to him.  By any standards used by preachers today, John was incredibly successful.  But something had changed.  John’s attendance was down.  Something was going wrong.

So his disciples came to him and said, “Rabbi, that guy you called the “Lamb of God,” he is copying your ministry and baptizing like you are. He even uses your sermon line, “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.”  And he is attracting our crowd.  We are down 30% in baptisms over the past month.  We’ve got to do something!

How does John respond? 

He could have been very jealous.  His life was hard.  He was an aesthetic.  Jesus went to marriage celebrations, feasts, and parties.  Meanwhile, John ate locusts and wild honey in the desert and only had water.  He lived in the wilderness.  He wore simple clothes.  He ends up in prison and is beheaded around 30 years old.  It was not easy being John the Baptist.

I imagine John’s response shocked his disciples.  They had given up their life to follow John.  They believed in his message of repentance.   And they had seen people flock to him and commit to the cause by being baptized.  Then, his disciples saw Jesus preaching the same sermon that John was preaching, and his disciples were baptized just as they were.  Jesus and his followers were stealing their show.

And John says, “This is exactly how it is supposed to be.”  John knew his place and he stayed in his lane.  

John tells them:
Listen, guys, you’ve heard me say it several times.  This Jesus is the Messiah we have been praying for and looking for for hundreds of years.   People kept asking me if I was the Messiah.  You know I never claimed to be.  From the beginning, I told you my job was to prepare the people for the coming Messiah by acknowledging their sins and repenting.  And then it was my place to point out the Messiah when he arrived.  And you saw him yourself.  You know that the bridegroom and the bride are the stars of the wedding day.  It is not the best man’s place to upstage the groom.  The attendants don’t upstage the bride. The best man is the supporting actor, not the star.  A good friend of the groom will only be happy to see the groom come and take his bride. 

My ministry was to prepare the way and point towards Jesus.  So when Jesus came, it was the happiest day of my life.  My joy was complete when I saw Jesus.  That is the task God gave me.  It is not all about me. —-It is all about Jesus and the kingdom he is building.

Get your attitudes right.

John knows Jesus is the messiah.  He knows that Jesus will do amazing miracles and be the great teacher of Israel.  But he doesn’t get to follow Jesus.  Did you ever wonder why John the Baptist didn’t get to be one of Jesus’ disciples?  If I were Jesus, I would have picked John first.  He was the most qualified.  He understood Jesus’ message.  In fact, Jesus picks up John’s message and preaches it verbatim.  And John was willing.  He had proved he was willing to do whatever God called him to do.  However, Jesus did not choose John to be his disciple.

He didn’t get to follow Jesus; he didn’t hear Jesus’ sermons, see his miracles, and perform miracles like Jesus’ disciples.  Instead, his path was to preach a bit longer in the wilderness and then be arrested,  languish in prison, and be beheaded by an evil king.  

This would make most people bitter.  It would make most people question God.  But how John answers his disciples reveals the attitude of John that we all need to understand and adopt.  

“A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given to him from heaven.”

Do you think we earned anything we have in life?  Did you earn the right to live today?  Does God owe you another day of life?  Did you do something before birth to deserve to be born in this place?  Who gave you this land?  Who gave you the smarts to achieve what you have achieved?  

Some people consider themselves ‘self-made men.’ They came from modest income or poor families and have become very successful in the business world.  They are reluctant to support programs for people in need because they feel that everyone else should pick up themselves by their bootstraps as they did.  They have forgotten how God gifted them personally to become successful. They don’t understand that some have limited IQ, mental illness, chronic medical problems, or haven’t gotten the “lucky breaks” they got.  They think they have done it all themselves. They have forgotten the grace God gave them.

This attitude of John the Baptist is critical to understand.  He knew his place.  He said he wasn’t even worthy to be a slave to Jesus; he wasn’t even worthy to do the lowest job of a slave – to untie his sandals.  But despite his unworthiness, Jesus gave him a place, a job to do.  And that gave him joy.  Joy came from serving where God placed him.

So he says, “He must increase, I must decrease.”

Look, disciples of John. This has been the plan from the beginning. Our job was to point out the Messiah so he could assume his role. It is not all about us, but it is natural to see the world as if it is all about us.

Francis Chan, in his book Crazy Love, says it so well:
“Even though I glimpse God’s holiness, I am still dumb enough to forget that life is all about God and not about me at all. It goes sort of like this…. Suppose you are an extra in an upcoming movie. You will probably scrutinize that one scene where hundreds of people are milling around, just waiting for that two-fifths of a second when you can see the back of your head. Maybe your mom and your closest friend get excited about that two-fifths of a second with you … maybe. But no one else will realize it is you. Even if you tell them, they won’t care. Let’s take it a step further. What if you rent out the theater on opening night and invite all your friends and family to come see the new movie about you? People will say, “You’re an idiot! How could you think this movie is about you?” Many Christians are even more delusional than the person I’ve been describing. So many of us think and live like the movie of life is all about us. Now consider the movie of life…. God creates the world. (Were you alive then? Was God talking to you when He proclaimed “It is good” about all He had just made?) Then people rebel against God (who, if you haven’t realized it yet, is the main character in this movie), and God floods the earth to rid it of the mess people made of it. Several generations later, God singles out a ninety-nine-year-old man called Abram and makes him the father of a nation (did you have anything thing to do with this?). Later, along come Joseph and Moses and many other ordinary and inadequate people that the movie is also not about. God is the one who picks them and directs them and works miracles through them. In the next scene, God sends judges and prophets to His nation because the people can’t seem to give Him the one thing He asks of them (obedience). And then, the climax: The Son of God is born among the people whom God still somehow loves. While in this world, the Son teaches His followers what true love looks like. Then the Son of God dies and is resurrected and goes back up to be with God. And even though the movie isn’t quite finished yet, we know what the last scene holds. It’s the scene I already described in chapter 1: the throne room of God. Here every being worships God who sits on the throne, for He alone is worthy to be praised. From start to finish, this movie is obviously about God. He is the main character. How is it possible that we live as though it is about us? Our scenes in the movie, our brief lives, fall somewhere between the time Jesus ascends into heaven (Acts) and when we will all worship God on His throne in heaven (Revelation). We have only our two-fifths-of-a-second-long scene to live. I don’t know about you, but I want my two-fifths of a second to be about my making much of God. First Corinthians 10:31 says, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.” That is what each of our two-fifths of a second is about. So what does that mean for you? Frankly, you need to get over yourself. It might sound harsh, but that’s seriously what it means. Maybe life’s pretty good for you right now. God has given you this good stuff so that you can show the world a person who enjoys blessings, but who is still totally obsessed with God. Or maybe life is tough right now, and everything feels like a struggle. God has allowed hard things in your life so you can show the world that your God is great and that knowing Him brings peace and joy, even when life is hard. Like the psalmist who wrote, “I saw the prosperity of the wicked…. Surely in vain have I kept my heart pure…. When I tried to understand all this, it was oppressive to me till I entered the sanctuary of God” (Ps. 73:3, 13, 16-17). It is easy to become disillusioned with the circumstances of our lives compared to others’. But in the presence of God, He gives us a deeper peace and joy that transcends it all. To be brutally honest, it doesn’t really matter what place you find yourself in right now. Your part is to bring Him glory-whether eating a sandwich on a lunch break, drinking coffee at 12:04 a.m. so you can stay awake to study, or watching your four-month-old take a nap. The point of your life is to point to Him. Whatever you are doing, God wants to be glorified, because this whole thing is His. It is His movie, His world, His gift.”1

But we tend to make it all about us. We do that even in church. Have you ever heard anyone say, “I really enjoyed worship today” or “I just don’t get much out of the worship there”? That is worship all about us. You aren’t supposed to get something out of worship; you’re supposed to put something in.

Matt Redman tells the story about his song, “The Heart of Worship.” He says that their church was going through some difficult times. There have been all these discussions about the style of worship: some said it was too fast, too slow, too loud, or too soft. “I like that song,” or “I don’t like that song.” “I like the way this worship leader does it.”  “The drums are too loud.” “The lights are too bright.”  “The preaching lasts too long.” “The songs are old.

People were becoming consumers, judging worship like a product you buy at a store. It was all about them and what they enjoyed.  He said we aren’t worshipping to “get something out of it,” but we are supposed to be bringing something to worship.

So this big contemporary church with a professional-level worship band removed the sound system and all the instruments off the stage.  They did away with the sermon; they did away with all of it. They told people, “Ask God what you can bring as an offering today in worship.”  So, people showed up with their Bibles and nothing else.  He said it was very awkward at first.  But then people started singing hymns with just voices; someone would read a scripture and testify what God was doing in their life.  They discovered true worship.  No show.  There was no performance on stage.  It was all about God.  And he said it was good.2

After this experience in their church, Redman wrote the song “Heart of Worship,” which expresses what I feel is the attitude of John the Baptist.  Here is the second verse and chorus:

King of endless worth
No one could express
How much You deserve
Though I’m weak and poor
All I have is Yours
Every single breath
I’ll bring You more than a song
For a song in itself
Is not what You have required
You search much deeper within
Through the way things appear
You’re looking into my heart
I’m coming back to the heart of worship
And it’s all about You,
It’s all about You, Jesus
I’m sorry, Lord, for the thing I’ve made it
And it’s all about You,
It’s all about You, Jesus3

True worship is all about God. If we make it about us and what we like, then who is being worshipped? Is it about you or God? Revelation 4 and 5 describe the worship in heaven, with the throne in the center, all the elders, spirits, and creatures, and a rainbow of light around the throne. And who is on the throne? He who is worthy.

Worship is not something you come to church to do.  Every moment of your life should be a time of worship because worship is the unworthy recognizing the worthy.  We come to church to join together and point out that God alone is worthy.  We recognize him as our creator and sustainer, as the one who is love, who is peace, who is grace, who is comfort, who is healing, who is good.  He alone is worthy of worship.  

The other day, our grandson was at the house and wanted his mother to see what he had done.  She was busy talking, and he kept saying Mama, mama, mama, louder and louder until she acknowledged him.  With our daughter it was “Look at me! Look at me!” whenever she did something and wanted our attention.  That is natural for a child.  Apparently, it is also natural for anyone on social media..  Look at me! I got a new car! Look at me! My son got an award!  Look at me!  My daughter’s going to the prom! Look at me!  I went on a trip!  I guess it is natural for all of us.   Now, don’t get me wrong.  I enjoy keeping up with what is going on with my friends and past acquaintances.  There is nothing wrong with that.  But our job on this earth is not to point to ourselves but, like John the Baptist, to point to Jesus.  So keep posting all of that.  But perhaps, sometimes, you could say, ‘Look at Jesus!  Look what he did today!’  That might make Facebook a little more worth looking at.

You have a place in the kingdom.  You matter.  Yeah, it is not all about you. You are not the star.  But you are more than an extra in this movie of life.  You are more than a background actor.  There are no small parts in God’s world.  You have a speaking role.  You can contribute to the kingdom if you understand your place like John the Baptist and fulfill the role God has given you.  Everyone take your hand and point.  You can point at yourself or some other person… but point up.  This is what we are to do.  

Like John, our job is to stand and point out Jesus.  He must increase.  I must decrease.

Every church has a place in the kingdom. Some churches will never be a huge mega-church.  Many will never be a Saddleback or a Northpoint or as numerically successful as other churches in their area.  But every church has a place in the kingdom.  Our job is to seek God’s plan, seek His will, know our place, and fulfill our role to point to Jesus. Churches fail when they advertise themselves.  ‘Look at how great our church is! We have great music, a good preacher, great facilities, and wonderful programs.’  Slow down the self-promotion bus!   All churches should exist to point not to themselves but to point to Jesus.  If we spend a lot of time promoting ourselves or our church, we are failing in our mission to make everything about Jesus.  And our job at church in this community is to help others learn to point to Jesus.

Let me tell you about Tommy. Someone I met who taught me about all about pointing to Jesus.  One of my life’s most meaningful worship experiences happened with him in an unusual place. It was in the middle of nowhere, in Northern Ghana, Africa.  There was not a village for miles.  I rode out with the pastor.  Tommy had no training as a pastor.  He was a diesel mechanic.  He retired from his diesel business in Alabama and would come with his wife 3-4 times a year to service the diesel generators for the Baptist Hospital there.  There was initially no other electricity. They depended on the generator.  When his wife passed away, Tommy left Alabama and moved to Ghana to do maintenance at the hospital. Tommy had an important job.  But God had more for Tommy.

Tommy loved people, but he loved Jesus even more.  He started off plowing fields for people living in a remote area near the hospital.  He had the only tractor anywhere around.  He kept little spiral notebooks in his pocket and wrote down words he didn’t know. He taught himself the Manpruli language.  And he started three preaching points.   I was there on a medical mission trip, and he invited me on a Sunday morning to go with him.  He picked me up in his truck, and soon, it was filled with people we had met on the dusty roads.  Everyone knew Tommy.  Everyone.  On the way to the church, we must have picked up and dropped off 30 or more people here and there.  Then we left the area of villages and went 4-5 miles out further.  We stopped by a solitary mango tree in an empty field. As far as I could see, there was nothing in all directions.  But in a few minutes, I could see people walking miles away from every direction.  They had seen the dust his truck kicked up and knew it was time for church.  We waited about an hour and a half for everyone to have time to walk the 3-4 miles to where we were.  While we waited, Tommy told me what he would preach about because I didn’t speak the language.  

Then it started.  And people spontaneously started praising God.  They clapped, beat the drums they brought, and they danced.  And it was beautiful.  Tommy would tell me what the song was about now and then, but I didn’t need the explanation.  It was worship.  It was recognizing a God who had been so good to them.  There was a good mango crop that year, and they were thanking God.  After about an hour or so of praising God, they all sat on the ground and listened to Tommy tell them how God was the creator and how the idols often worshiped in the area were just wood made by man.  And they listened.  And they responded.  And several stood and bore witness.  And I was blessed beyond measure to see people I couldn’t understand point to Jesus.4

The attitude of John the Baptist.  

John’s role was to speak the truth and die for it. He had known the crowds at one time. He was ‘the next best thing,’ people flocked from the cities to hear him preach. But then the crowds were gone, and he saw his flock dwindle. Then he was arrested and beheaded.  His life had been hard, but the last years were miserable in Herod’s prison in Machaerus. Most people who spoke of John would say he was a 30-year-old failure, a has-been who didn’t live up to his potential. He had few followers and few friends.

But there was one who gave him praise.

Matt. 11:11   Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. 

It does not matter what the world thinks of you or if you are successful in the eyes of this world. What matters is what Jesus thinks of you.  There is only one affirmation we should seek, and only one matters. I care not what the world thinks of me. There is one voice I want to hear. I have wasted too much of my life seeking praise from others.  I want to hear Jesus say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

What about you?  Let’s all seek to live lives that point to Jesus.  Let our worship be all about Him, not about us.  Let our very attitude be that He must increase, and I must decrease.

  1. Chan, Francis. Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God.  (2013) Kindle location 231.
  2. Interview with Matt Redman, BBC Radio 2013.
  3. “Heart of Worship” by Matt Rodman, 1999.
  4. I pray for God’s richest blessings on Tommy Harrison. In a single Sunday morning, he taught me more about living for Jesus throughout your life, humility, and true worship than I could have ever learned anywhere else.  He had an immeasurable impact on so many people during his time in Ghana.