Context is helpful, but it’s hard to hold things together when you just hear them. Below I have a sketch of the life and ministry of Paul, his second missionary journey. It’s a bit more specific than the historical evidence supports with confidence, but it is a plausible reconstruction of Paul’s life. It’s drawn from scholars like NT Wright and David DeSilva (if you’re interested).

We opened an important discussion Wednesday night about the characteristics of the kingdom of God. It centered around the idea of whether or not the kingdom of God is “spiritual.” I think the adjective “spiritual” has such a broad range of meanings that it becomes unhelpful.

There’s a rift in New Testament studies about the role of works in the Torah/Law. It’s a fairly modern rift, with the major work being Paul and Palestinian Judaism by EP Sanders, first published in 1977. If you ask a group of New Testament scholars what the most important book in the field has been in the past 50 years, no other work will get mentioned as often as PPJ.

Something about Christmas causes it to have an outsized influence on Western society. Theologically, Easter is the big holiday, but it comes and goes with little fanfare. Christmas, however, gets an entire aesthetic—its own music, movies, food. We spend at least 1/12th of the year preparing for Christmas, and often more than that. Christmas is a cultural juggernaut. 

Prophets of exile (think Jeremiah, Ezekiel, parts of Isaiah) have a difficult task. They are calling God’s people to faithfulness before the exile—“repent, so that the day of destruction may not come upon you!”—even as destruction is looming. That’s the story of the first half of Isaiah and much of Jeremiah, as well as smaller prophets like Micah. The false prophets during this time period seem to say God will not allow his people to be destroyed, because he has made a covenant with them and he will not break his covenant. The true prophets say, yes, he does have a covenant with us, but it requires us to fulfill our part of it—live with justice and righteousness in the land. You are not living with justice and righteousness, therefore the covenant is broken, therefore God is going to punish us with destruction.

Why does God threaten to destroy the idolatrous Israelites at the bottom of Mt. Sinai? He doesn’t actually do it because Moses talks him out of it. Is Moses more compassionate with the Israelites than God is? Is he more kind or loving, that he should see they shouldn’t be destroyed even when God can’t or doesn’t?

For the past 3000+ years, people have been reading and studying Scripture, learning from it and being shaped by it (or, more precisely, learning from and being shaped by God through it). No other writings have had such a profound impact on human experience. If the Bible is anything, it’s a phenomenal (one might say, divine) piece of literature. 

Exodus 3 “I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” doesn’t technically say anything about resurrection, though Jesus says we should grasp from that statement that “He is God not of the dead, but of the living,” (Mt. 22.32) and thus that the resurrection is real.

We are all familiar with how laws and the legal system works in America. If you break the law, you get punished with fines or prison. Police enforce the law, judges apply the law to specific situations. There’s some room for flexibility, but the whole system is supposed to be more or less objective.

I’ve been wrestling with truth this week for some reason. It’s a bit of a silly thing to wrestle with. How do you wrestle something you can’t touch? And why would you want to wrestle something as innocent and benign as truth?

It’s a bit strange to think that God is shaping our lives through Scripture. Take yourself back to the church in Corinth on that fine Sunday morning they first received Paul’s letter. They gather in the room of the house, sing and pray. They sit and settle in for an encouraging letter from Paul. ‘He was so kind and generous in person! Since he’s left, we’ve been fed by the teachings of Apollos, and that great Apollos straightened us all out!”

A lot of the hopes and disappointments of Israel revolve around the kings. Take, for instance, Ahaz. God speaks to Ahaz time and again through Isaiah, Hosea, and Micah. God sends him this great sign, Immanuel, “God with us,” so that Ahaz will know he can rely on God (Isa. 7.3-17). But Ahaz ignores God. He relies on himself, making an alliance with Assyria.

I wonder if we don’t do ourselves, our neighbors, and God a disservice by focusing so much on the final judgment. I believe in the final judgment, the final day of reckoning, where the book of life will be opened and we will be judged based on our deeds, sheep to one side, goats to the other. But focusing on it hasn’t seemed to help us much. 

Quite often I come across an idea that reshapes the way I understand a story in the Bible. I was under the impression I had already had my understanding of the Garden of Eden upended, so I could just go through life with this new and improved understanding of it, only to have that understanding reshaped into something different still! I guess what Jesus said was true—“every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old,” (Mt. 13.52). But we’re talking about Genesis 3.

Since we are now in Acts 21, with all those references to the Holy Spirit in previous chapters we may ask, “What is the Holy Spirit up to in Acts?” What is he doing in the lives of disciples and in the church? Especially in this chapter, what is Holy Spirit up to in travelers of the Way like Paul? He and his fellow travelers are approaching Jerusalem (Acts 21:1-16) and finally arrive as planned by Pentecost (Acts 21:17-22:1). But they arrive for events which none, perhaps even Paul himself, anticipated when the Holy Spirit helped him plan that journey.

According to the travelogue in today’s text (Acts 20:1-16), Paul was a traveler and had many fellow travelers. After three years of ministry in Ephesus, by the Spirit, he came up with a basic itinerary to pass through Macedonia and Achaia and go to Jerusalem and “I must also see Rome” (19:21). Those plans were interrupted by a great disturbance concerning the Way. Paul was the chief object of their threats. When that uproar ceased, Paul began his trip with many long farewells (20:1-2, 7), especially the one in the second half of our text (20:17-38).

Apparently I’ve been reading the Old Testament wrong. Sunday I described the Law as God above Mt. Sinai, shouting down commands, “do this, don’t do that,” and so on. I knew it was a bit of an exaggeration, because the Psalms make it very clear how life-giving the Law is, and God shouting down rules is hardly “sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Ps. 119.103).

I forget where I saw it now, but someone said something to the effect of, “is it real faith if it doesn’t work in difficult situations?” The principle can be applied in other areas—“do we really hold to this moral ideal, if we give it up when it costs us something.” I might say that it is real faith/we do hold to the moral ideal, but it maybe isn’t a strong faith/strongly held belief. It’s still unfortunate, but not the end of the world.

For some reason, I’ve never had a great handle on what faith meant. Growing up, it always essentially meant, “do you believe Jesus died and was resurrected?” or “do you believe God exists?” Well, yes, but then again, I could just as easily believe he didn’t, and God doesn’t. That is the context in which I read Heb. 11.1—the resurrection and existence of God are “things hoped for,” “things not seen.” Faith meant I was assured of them, convicted about them, even though I had no evidence to substantiate that belief. Faith is a head-game, something that I do intellectually.

As strange as it may be, the only messiah (“anointed one”) in Isaiah is Cyrus. Throughout Isaiah 40-55, there is talk about this “servant” of God, perhaps it’s the prophet, perhaps it’s Judah, perhaps it’s someone else or a combination of people, but the servant is never the messiah, and the messiah is always Cyrus.