Last week I wrote about the Gospel being that God reigns, and how that’s still the Gospel, even though it’s difficult to see God reigning. In doing so, however, I neglected a key part of the kingdom of God—the Holy Spirit. 

Isaiah 52 places peace, good news, salvation, and “Your God reigns,” in parallel, suggesting that all four are related to one another. Peace is good news! Peace results from salvation, which is itself the result of the reign of God. The good news (the gospel) is that God reigns!

As a principle, the central part of the Gospel can only, ever, and always be the work of God. The most important part of the Gospel, the key part, the part we cannot ignore without losing the very nature of the “good” referenced by the “good news” (which is what Gospel means), is God’s work. This is more or less the way the idea of Gospel is used throughout the book of Isaiah. But what does that have to do with us?

I think we have a tendency to read Jesus into Isaiah, especially chapters 50-53. It is really difficult not to read the suffering servant as Jesus, and I don’t think that impulse is worth fighting too strongly against. 

I like the God-Jesus. God-Jesus is comforting. “Ah, God took on flesh! God played dress-up so that the goodness of our material nature could be confirmed! Isn’t that sweet?” Of course I know that you can’t separate the humanity and divinity of Jesus, as if he were half-and-half or something. He’s all God and all human, but we tend to emphasize one over the other in a given situation. “This is Jesus’s humanity shining through,” as if his divinity is taking a coffee break. So yeah, I like the God-Jesus—a clear expression of God’s love.

Reading Isaiah 47 about the destruction of Babylon is strange. Why does the prophet write it? It’s not written to Babylon, who is largely the subject of the chapter (I guess it’s the direct object, if you want to get technical). It’s written to the people of Judah, about the destruction of Babylon. Why? Perhaps more concerning is the tone. The chapter isn’t too concerned about how Babylon feels about it’s destruction. It’s a violent chapter, and the writer seems to revel in the violence God promises to work against Babylon. 

I think this is true more often than not—by the time an idea gets mainstream, it has been diluted enough to be less than entirely true. In the popularizing of the idea, important context and nuance gets lost, and the idea consequently becomes less helpful and is potentially misleading. The simplified idea has implications that the robust idea restrained.

Freedom is a wonderful gift. It’s one of the blessings of this country—having freedom. But freedom isn’t God, which is to say it’s not always good. Freedom is like all the other blessings from God—when used outside of the bounds God set for it, it becomes an idol and wields an inappropriate power over our lives.

Usually we just ridicule the question. “He was in the wrong from the beginning; his heart wasn’t in the right place. He just wanted to know how little he could get away with doing.” 

My Dad’s research revolves around farm animals and nutrition. Apparently a big part of that research is optimizing how well animals take in nutrients. If you’re going to feed an animal, you want the animal to get the most out of the feed. Feed is expensive, so you don’t want the nutrients you paid for to just pass right through the animal. The better the animal takes in the nutrients, the better the animal grows, the less time you have to feed the animal, the less feed you have to buy, the more profit you make on the animal. It’s a pretty simple equation, and makes intuitive sense.

Moses grew up in Egypt at the intersection between the Egyptians and the Israelites. Born an Israelite, adopted by an Egyptian, nursed by a slave, raised in a palace. You can imagine the pull between his two identities—respectable Egyptian education, with all its history, prestige, and culture, and Israelite blood, with only a few generations of history, lowly and enslaved, backwards. The Egyptians have a host of powerful gods; the Hebrews only have “the God of their fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

Following are excerpts from a letter from the Tuscumbia (AL) church of Christ thanking Christians for contributions given to support Ukrainian Christians.

One of the questions throughout human history has been, “If God is really good and really all-powerful, why do bad things happen to good people?” Why do the wicked prosper while the righteous suffer? Perhaps God isn’t actually good. Maybe he isn’t all-powerful. Or maybe he’s too far away, and doesn’t concern himself with human suffering.

After not that many years of abuse, my knees finally started giving out. I could feel it with every step I took. Something was seriously wrong, and walking only made it worse. I was walking wrong, I was sitting wrong, I was standing wrong. What I needed was to relearn how to walk, because clearly that was the problem.

The imagination is a powerful tool, for good or for ill. What innovation is not the result of a spark of the imagination? If that’s the case, then all of creation is the result of the imagination of our creator! And to think—he has given us that same ability!

I wonder how many of the problems we are facing right now stem from our unwillingness to be a part of creation. Creation is messy. It is cold. It is brutal. It is warm. It is compassionate. It is messy. To survive we have to kill and eat, a brutal act. But by surviving we are able to bring new life into creation, a compassionate act. The storm destroys, but also waters the earth. 

‘Foolish ones,’ replies Jesus. ‘How slow of heart you are to believe all that the creator God has said! Did you never hear that he created the world wisely? And that he has now acted within his world to create a truly human people? And that from within this people he came to live as a truly human person? And that in his own death he dealt with evil once and for all? And that he is even now at work, by his own spirit, to create a new human family in which repentance and forgiveness of sins are the order of the day, and so to challenge and overturn the rule of war, sex, money, and power?’ And, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, and now also the evangelists and apostles of the New Testament, he interprets to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

“People aren’t convinced that we have better answers than the world.” Dr. Harold Redd is an African-American minister in Memphis. He’s kind of the African-American minister in Memphis. He’s been involved in leading churches for decades in a city that has a lot of history on the race-relations front, and he says that, as far as racial issues goes, “people aren’t convinced that we have better answers than the world.”

Delightfully, Easter is one of the more historically credible events in the Gospels. We can quibble over the details, but the broad fact of the resurrection is pretty sure. Something has to explain why the early followers of Jesus continued to follow him after he was brutally crucified. The best explanation? He didn’t stay dead, but was resurrected.

Peace is often thought of as an internal state of being. You feel peace settle over you like a warm blanket. Your spirit is a still, deep pool. You are not anxious, or fearful, or unsettled. You are at peace. This is a good peace. A meaningful peace. It’s also more of a philosophical peace, sought after by the epicureans and stoics through removing attachments in life. I would guess it’s a similar idea to some eastern religions as well (hence the inner peace sought by the Jedi in Star Wars).