Author: Bob Bronkema

We finish up with the story of Paul in the Bible. He is brought to Rome after a very circuitous route. He should have lost hundreds of people on the ship with him, but he saw a vision where the Lord told him not one would be lost. As a result he was able to lead even as he was a prisoner himself. He gets to Rome and explains what his situation is, but the book of Acts ends in a way that does not really give us any answers as to what happens to Paul. We assume that he dies in Rome, although we do not know that for sure and it is not mentioned anywhere in Scripture. Remember, Paul is the one who wrote most of the New Testament. He is a significant figure in Scripture not because he is in any way the Messiah, or even a leader in the church, Peter would have taken that role, but because he was so assiduous in his faith and in his planting of the churches.

Psalm 2 and the chapter in Proverbs gives us insight to important guidelines on how we should act. It is filled with moral teachings on how our ethics ought to reflect the ethic that we find in Scripture. Paul’s teachings remind us of the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus. The teachings in Psalms and Proverbs remind us what that looks like.

We find ourselves at the end of the life of Joshua and he recounts how it was God who fought the battles of the Israelites, and not him, although it was obvious that he was a primary leader in all of the battles in which the Israelites participated. He is at the end of his life and he wants the Israelites to rededicate themselves to the Lord. But in the midst of this there is a problem, someone sees an altar that has been made by a tribe of the Israelites. God is furious and the people are furious, but those who built the altar have a great reason. They say this is a memorial to our God. They lived on the other side of the Jordan than the other tribes and so if the day came when those on the other side of the river forget their tribes and forgot that they were the people of God, if they were to come on the other side of the river to conquer them they would see the altar and be reminded that these are also people of God. That satisfied God, Joshua, and the people of Israel since it was not a false idol.

In Acts we find Paul who is in chains and bound and is about to be beaten but then he appeals to Rome and they whisk him away from a plot against his life, but he is still bound. He meets some of the muckity mucks who are expecting a bribe from him, but he doesn’t give him, but they still protect him. We see that Paul is still in chains for his faith and he doesn’t hesitate to preach the Gospel even while in chains. He is worried about less protecting himself and more about pronouncing the Gospel to anyone who would hear. What a great lesson for all of us.

We finish the section in Acts with a tease. Paul gets up to speak and our reading ends there. Joshua recounts the giving not only of the land but also of the livestock to the priests who were promised no land but were promised to be taken care of by the people of Israel. We also find mentioned the city of refuge for the person who killed someone but by mistake, he could then flee to a city of refuge and not be killed by the avenging family. It sounds like this may have happened a lot since this isn’t the first and only time that it is mentioned and since there were quite a few cities that carried this moniker.

Paul continues on his journeys on boat finding himself surrounded by mobs here and there and by disciples who would protect him from those said mobs by telling him which way to go and which city he was and was not to enter. But the underlying theme in all of this is the church grows, and grows, and continues to grow. The blessing of the Holy Spirit is not relegated to the first century. We see growth of the Christian church in most places in the world except, maybe, in the Western World. I believe there is a message there to the church in the Western World, in the developed world.

Joshua continues to hand out land to the twelve tribes of Israel as if it were candy.  All of Joshua that we are reading contains the people of Israel fulfilling the promise that God had given to their ancestor Abraham, who then passed it on to Moses, who then gave it to Joshua to complete.  There were a few tribes who were a bit reticent to go and take the land, maybe they were a bit afraid, because not all the Israelites went with each other to take over the land.  God had promised it to them, so really all the people that they had to fight was always going to be sufficient to take over the land.

Paul, in a somewhat similar fashion, also travels around starting churches and spending time with the people in the churches.  There are quite a few famous protagonists that we can’t forget their name or who they are.  We see Timothy introduced and he was circumcised even though he comes on the scene after it was decided that Greeks, his dad was one, or gentiles, did not need to be circumcised.  I guess out of an abundance of caution he was.  We see Lydia, the dealer in purple fabrics.  We read about Titus and their time in Philippi, and Ephesus, and Corinth.  All of these place to whom Paul wrote letters and which makes up our New Testament canon.  We are approaching the end of Acts.

Joshua really has much of the same but what we find in Acts is pretty significant. We find a council of all the leaders and there they decide that when a gentile, a non-Jew, comes to faith in Jesus Christ, they do not have to become Jewish first and follow all of the Jewish rites and rituals, especially that of circumcision. We read in Acts that there was much rejoicing, and that totally makes sense because who wants to be circumcised if they don’t have to be? This is probably the most significant of the chapters in Acts which has the most significant decision of the early church. God has called all people into the church and all people are saved by the grace of God, and not by the actions that they take in order to become followers of God.

We see an accounting of all the battles that Joshua was involved in, all of which ended up with Joshua and Israel winning the battles and conquering the lands. One by one, and there are many, Joshua is given the battle. In one even hail stones are part of the victory that God brings about to the people of Israel. Even with the other nations gathering together and trying in a coordinated effort to overtake the Israelites, God is still stronger. This is the place where we see the most slaughter and battle and how the people of God take the land that was promised to them.

With Acts we see a different story where instead of battles and conquering of the gentiles, we see that the gentiles are fully included into the salvation story of God. Peter has a dream, what I call “pigs in a blanket” where he sees all of the unclean animals that were forbidden to be eaten declared clean by God for what God has made is clean, period. We also see Saul, who has now become Paul, welcomed into the fellowship and gentiles who were outside of the community brought into the community even under much criticism. Instead of God demanding a certain rigor in who is part of His people, we see an opening and an expansion of God’s people to all of humanity. This is crucial to who is now God’s people. It is not just the Israelites, but all of creation and all of humanity.

We find Joshua commanded by God to do things that in our modern day sensibilities just might offend us. He was commanded to invade lands and to destroy all things within the cities except for the livestock and the plunder. So all men, women, and children were to be killed. There is one city in our reading where we see that 36,000 people are killed by the sword. One of you just might say, enough is enough, you made your point. But the point is that as we see even in our reading, the worship of other gods was so prevalent that the Israelites had a hard time turning away from that temptation. The entire family of the Israelite who buried the treasure and the gods of a foreign land was destroyed because it could be considered a cancer among them. If the people were allowed to live who worshipped other gods then without a doubt they would have influenced the Israelites even more to worship other gods. Does it bother me, of course it does, but it also makes sense. For us today it means to get rid of anything in our lives that would drive us towards that which takes us away from God.

In Acts we see the first martyr of Jesus’ sake after Jesus dies. Stephen is stoned to death because he tells the history of the people of God, the new people of God. As a result he is stoned to death. We see some of my favorite stories in the Bible in this reading. The conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch is powerful because God is presented to him on his own terms and he asks the question: what is to prevent me from being baptized. We see the conversion of Saul to Paul as he makes his way to Damascus and the ensuing confusion by the disciples because they remember him as being scary and one that you could not trust. But then he becomes the one who plants the churches and writes the theology of the church. You see, God is able to use anyone, even, or especially, those who at one time opposed him.

In our Joshua Scripture the writer works hard to establish Joshua as the rightful ruler and someone who was just as powerful as Moses and even as powerful as the other patriarchs that went before him. Here, he is told to circumcise all of the people of Israel, just like what Abraham was commanded to do. You see as they wandered in the wilderness and babies were being born they were not circumcised, which had to be done eventually. That eventually was now. They cross over into the promised land through the Jordan, with the feet of the priests in the Jordan so that it stopped flowing. This was just like Moses. They conquer Jericho without any trouble at all with the wall of Jericho tumbling down, which was uniquely Joshua. At some point we read that the people of Israel considered Joshua with awe, much like they did Moses who met with God face to face.

In Acts we can’t avoid the fact that the earliest disciples and the earliest church lived so differently than we did. Not one of them owned anything, but together, they owned everything. This was so crucial to how the church grew. We also see the important choosing of the deacons as they went out and did the work of the Lord of waiting on tables for the needy which was so different from the work that the apostles did which was preaching the Gospel to anyone who might hear. This preaching of the Gospel was forbidden by the religious leaders, but they kept doing it and we see the church grow and grow.

We find ourselves at the beginning of two really great sections of Scripture. Over and over again we find Joshua being encouraged not only by the Lord, but also by the people who surround him, to be strong and courageous as he takes over for Moses. We find ourselves with the relative of Jesus, Rahab, who harbors fugitives who will eventually utterly destroy the city in which she finds herself. But it is truly a survival of the fittest as we read that the people of Jericho know what is coming and that they are no match for the Israelite force, so Rahab simply pairs up with the strongest. Not a whole lot of thought is given to the fact that the two spies spent the night with a prostitute, that seems just to be matter of fact.

We then transition to the birthday of the church where we find the Holy Spirit being gifted to the church as they are gathered in Jerusalem. You do notice that none of the disciples waste any time when they have an opportunity to evangelize and to tell people about Jesus. It is what drives them and what motivates them when they are either healing a lame person in the temple or when they are explaining what just happened with the tongues of fire and the many different languages that the fishermen were able to speak.

We can’t keep going without drawing attention to Acts 2:43-47 where we find the earliest description of the first church that gathered after Jesus ascended into heaven. They had everything in common, they spent all time together, they were of one mind. What an image to emulate and to remind us that this is possible.

It is best to begin this post by drawing our attention to Psalm 1. We find here laid out for us the way in which we ought to live, pursuing righteousness as opposed to evil, and then when we live that way there is a blessing that seems to come as a result. I can’t help but read this Psalm and think about Moses whose life ends in our reading in Deuteronomy today. He blesses the tribes individually and then we see him able to look out at the land that the Lord has promised to His people. As the Scripture states, there was no other person like Moses who walked upon the earth since, someone who saw God face to face. That still rings true today.