have mercy oh God with unfailing love

with great compassion blot out my transgression

against you alone, have i surely sinned

truly you are right, in your accusation

Finally, in Galatians 5:1-15, Paul addresses the issue confronting his readers, circumcision, the cutting off the foreskin of a male Jew. While offensive to our senses, it is understandable that Paul refers to cutting three times in this passage. In verse 7 he speaks of those cut in on his readers with persuasions to be circumcised. In verse 4 Paul said that those who are circumcised as the essential mark of salvation and being God’s people are cut off from Christ. Shockingly, Paul ends this section by wishing that those agitators who were into cutting would cut themselves (verse 12). What are we to make of text and its argument about freedom in Christ versus submitting to a yoke of slavery?

William Coperthwaite wrote A Handmade Life: In Search of Simplicity as a text on how society could be better. He takes an aspect of life at a time, exploring where society has taken an unhealthy path, and what could be done to rectify it. It’s not a Christian book, but at times I’ve been struck by how Christian it unwittingly is.

Time and again recently I’ve heard someone talk about “the big 10” (meaning the 10 commandments) and how they’re “still as relevant to us today as they used to be, even though we’ve been freed from the law.” As I am still unable to read minds, I’m not sure exactly what they mean, but since they tend to be American I’m a little suspicious. Do we still think the 10 commandments ought to be followed? All 10? 

I don’t make the rules; I just live by them. It’s not my fault owners, managers, administrators, and others like them make more than laborers. The higher up in an organization you go, the more responsibility you have and the more money you make. When you’re overseeing other people, you earn more money than they do. When you oversee a lot of people, you make a lot more than they do. It’s just the way things work.

A woodworker has many tools she can use—saws, chisels, planes, etc.—but it’s important for the tools to be sharp. Unfortunately, sharpening is a little complicated. Take a hand plane blade—the cutting edge needs set to roughly 25 degrees; the edge needs to be straight or with a slight curve, so that the corners of the blade don’t dig in and mar what you’re flattening; the bevel needs to be reasonably flat—if it’s too rounded the cutting edge won’t contact the wood and it won’t cut.

Sometimes it’s difficult to know what God is doing. So you have these wonderful dreams, dreams where you’re finally on top of the world, and you tell others these dreams, and it causes them to turn against you. “We’re going to bow to you? Only ever in your dreams, cause it ain’t happening in real life ever!” I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t really mean anything. Maybe it’s just a fancy. 

I am not wired for contentment. I have always gauged myself against others who are “more” than me, longing to achieve the greatness they have already attained. We tend to be this way as a society. We look at other people and want what they have. We equate progress and growth with success. Maintaining status is insufficient; losing status, unthinkable. We need more money, better food, more ease, a bigger car, on and on. This idea, this unwillingness to be content has infected all levels of our society.

The deeply unsatisfying message of Gal. 2.15-21 is that we cannot force ourselves to become righteous. We can’t optimize our life in just the right way to ensure we will be righteous. We can’t find or follow “8 simple rules for being righteous.” There’s no diet for it, no app for it, no surgery for it. 

We’ve established that the kingdom of God is the reign of God. The kingdom of God is where/when what God wants to happen actually does happen. Because God’s purposes are cosmic (new heavens and new earth), God has a will for creation as well as individual humans. Thus to say the kingdom of God is a reign, is to imply is is also a realm, a place. But where is this place?

When Saul experiences the resurrected Jesus on the road to Damascus, it poses a bit of a problem. The first problem is that Jesus was crucified as a messianic pretender, but he was actually the Messiah. Saul had strict views of what it took to be righteous in God’s sight. Jesus’ life looked like a rejection of many of those notions, but apparently Jesus knew what he was doing better than Saul did! After all, which one was at the right hand of God?

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.