Bible Reading Challenge Blog

Once again God establishes a covenant with Abraham and this time there is a visible sign of God’s invisible grace which is circumcision. This act of cutting off the foreskin becomes the marker for the people of Israel to separate them from those around them. Now, the separation was also that they worshipped the one and only true God, but circumcision served as the sign of the covenant that God establishes with Israel.

Today that is no longer the covenant sign that God has with us through Jesus Christ. The covenant sign that God has with us through Jesus is that of baptism. No longer is it reserved just for the males of God’s people, but rather for all people. This act of baptism is much less brutal, no blood is required to be shed, and it is something that Jesus himself endured, similar to circumcision, as a child.

As Presbyterians we do not shy away from infant baptism, and we believe that baptism is necessary and important as a marker of being a child of God. Infant baptism, like circumcision, is the marker of being a child of God and it demonstrates that God has chosen us even before we could choose God. This is the beauty and the power of predestination. God has predestined us to be His children, not by our choice, but by his grace. This is the difference between a believer’s baptism and infant baptism, the emphasis is on God in the latter and on our action in the former. God’s choosing us is what is important, and our response ought to be us choosing him.

Jesus’ raising of Lazarus is one of those stories that contain so many important theological truths. We find Martha professing that Jesus is the Messiah. We see Jesus telling Martha that he is the resurrection and the life, something that we all need to remember as the resurrection is one of those necessary doctrines which is not fungible. We will be raised from the dead as Jesus was raised from the dead.

I love seeing and reading about Jesus weeping. It makes me think that maybe I don’t have things as wrong as I think I do when I find myself somewhat overcome with emotion.

We see the covenant that God establishes with Abram. Abram becomes rich as a result of his lying to Pharaoh about Sarah who goes into the Egyptian court for who knows how long. It turns out poorly for the ruler and Abraham eventually get back his wife, but I had forgotten that Pharaoh in this version of the story actually has Sarah in his court for quite a bit of time. It is obvious that he considers her now his wife until she is given back to Abraham. The horror that she must have been under because her husband forced her to pretend that she was his sister.

But let’s look at my favorite verse in the entire Bible. With children you don’t have favorites, but with Bible verses, I think it is okay to have favorites. If you look at John 8:32 you will find my favorite: “You will know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” the desire for freedom is ingrained in all of our lives, and certainly is one with which I resonate. The freedom that we have in Christ is something that is unparalleled in this world. Jesus tells us in these verses that while we pursue sin in our lives we may think that we free, but in fact we are bound to the actions and the results that come about as a result of our sin. We become slaves to sin and its impacts on our lives.

When we choose to follow Jesus then he is our Lord and we live with the repercussions of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus. Those repercussions translate into a freedom that we cannot imagine. We often think that being a disciple of Jesus means living a rigid legalistic life. No, that is what Jesus came to fulfill, not institutionalize. Being a follower of Jesus is not being a follower of rules. It is being a follower of the one who gives life and life abundantly. That is what happens when we follow Jesus we see our entire life stretch out before us in a way that leads to life. This is the amazing thing about who Jesus is, he gives us life and freedom. It is that freedom that I will always want to pursue.

We find ourselves in the midst of some of the favorite Bible stories that we all know. The story of Noah and the ark in which we find the introduction of the rainbow as the sign of a covenant between God and his people. God will never again destroy the earth because of the disobedience of the people. In case we think that things are getting so bad on this earth that God is going to give up on us and destroy us Noah style, well, all we need is a sun shower to dispel that notion. The rainbow has been coopted so many times within our society and culture to represent something quite other than what it was originally intended. The rainbow found its origin in a promise from God to all people. It is a sign of love for all people.

That then takes us to the story of the tower of Babel where we see those who have been newly saved from the flood making a name for themselves by building a tower that is able to reach to the heavens. The key to these verses is that they are making a name for themselves. God never wants us to make a name for ourselves, He wants us to make a name for Him. There is nothing more simple than that and nothing more textbook than our desire to make a name for ourselves. Isn’t that what led us to eat an apple? This sin seems to keep repeating itself over and over again.

We are then introduced to Abraham and Sarah in their pre-newname phase of Abram and Sarai. The story of Israel really go from there.

John gives us Jesus who is consistently talking in the temple and telling anyone who would list who he actually is. We can’t skip over the feeding of the 5,000 and the providing of the bread and fish by a boy. This is John’s communion. We don’t see Jesus at the table with his disciples at the end of John at a meal with the institution of the last supper. We see them at a table and then Jesus washes their feet, but not the institution of the Lord’s Supper like the other Gospels have. Here we see Jesus takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and distributes it. That is the formula for communion and it happens here and it is all initiated by a child. Isaiah couldn’t have been more right when he said: “And a little child shall lead them”.

We then see Jesus give what his disciples say are a difficult teaching, which again refers back to communion. Jesus gives meaning to the bread and the wine which are his flesh and his blood. It might be the right time to explain our Presbyterian belief about communion. We know that there are two opposite ends of the spectrum in relationship to what churches believe happens in communion. Every church believes that Jesus is present in communion. The difference is how Jesus is present. I the less sacramental churches, for example non-denominational and anabaptist, communion is something that we do to remember what Jesus did for us. It serves as nothing more than a memorial for his sacrifice. This is important to remember it, but there is more to it than that for some.

The other end of that spectrum are the literalists who believe that the bread and the wine are literally the body and the blood of Jesus. With the words of the priest the elements are transubstantiated and turned into a physical flesh and a physical blood. These verses in John provide some Scripture for support. For Presbyterians we are somewhere in between where we find ourselves believing in the real spiritual presence of Jesus not in the elements themselves, but in the community of believers who are gathered. We believe that the Holy Spirit is present in communion within the faithful in a unique way which finds its power in the Holy Spirit.

Do you find that every time that you read Scripture you see something new and potentially even something that helps you on your daily walk? Sometimes you see something new that isn’t life changing, just a fun fact. Other times you see something that actually provides you with a new way in which to live your life which is life giving. So, today’s readings contain a little of both. Methuselah is considered the oldest person in the Bible, he lived to be 969 years old. But did you notice that Noah didn’t start having kids until he was 500 years old? He and his kids got onto the ark when he was 600 and they were 100 years old. We can’t help but imagine what we would look like when we were that age. Interestingly enough it is in our readings today when God basically says, okay, enough of these super old people, let’s set the age to 120. These are fun facts, but not life changing, but fun.

When we get to Jesus and the woman at the well, there we see something that maybe wasn’t noticed before but has incredible significance. Look at vs.42 in chapter 4. Remember, Jesus passes through Samaria because he is making his way back from the Jordan where he and his disciples were baptizing (although the Scripture says his disciples were baptizing and he really wasn’t, another fun fact!) toward the Sea of Galilee, back to where he changed the water to wine. Samaria was a lot like passing through a different country. It would be like having to go from Texas to California and on the way you had to pass through Mexico. But it was even more than that because the people of Samaria not only were of a different nationality, and different ethnically, but also religiously they believed in a different God than the Jews did.

Jesus engages a Samaritan woman who has had a bad rap over history. I bet when you think of this Samaritan woman in the back of your mind you see someone who is a sinner because she has 5 different husbands and is living with someone who is not even her husband now. What if, and this is my approach to her, she has had husbands who have died and she is currently living with a brother of one of the husbands who had died just like the law commands her to do? Then we move from seeing her as a sinner, a harlot, someone who was loose and would be with anyone who was available, to being very sympathetic to her because of the tragedy that she has had to experience in life losing so many husbands. That’s my approach to her.

The life changing portion of this Scripture is what the Samaritans say about Jesus, a group of foreigners, that at times we have a hard time seeing and saying: “This man really is the Savior of the world.” This is why we do what we do because Jesus really is the Savior of the world. How would our life look differently if we could proclaim day after day this same truth that became a reality to those who were considered outside of the norms of life, those who were considered unclean to the church. We often think it is only the church and its leaders who are able to lead the way forward and who somehow carry the truth with them. Not so, it is the Samaritans of this world whose eyes have been opened by the presence and the power of Jesus. It is a good wake up call for people like us.

We find in both Genesis and John the stories of creation. Genesis gives us the literal creation of all that we see in heaven and on earth, in the sea and in the sky. In John we see us being created as children of God, that takes root from the prompt that we find in Genesis that we are made in the image of God. This concept of being made in the image of God is not an appearance thing. Remember what God says to Samuel when he is trying to find the next king: “Do not look upon his appearance for people look on the outside, but God look upon the heart.” We are made in the image God in that we strive to be in relationship that gives life. Jesus gives life and we ought to desire to be in relationship with him.

We find in John the primary difference between the Old and the New Testament, which is in reality the difference between the Old and the New Covenant. Look at vs.17 where we read: “The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth were given by Jesus.” That is the difference. We no longer are relegated to following rules which dictate our lives and which bind us to inevitable sin. Instead, we find ourselves pursuing grace and truth in the person of Jesus Christ through a relationship that is completely unbound.

There are so many details in the creation story that I would love to touch on. Some see two creation stories, one in chapter 1 and the other in chapter 2. That is not my approach. I tend to harmonize the stories into one. What we find in chapter 1 is a general overview of creation. Chapter 2 gives us the specifics that we hear mentioned in chapter 1, specifically in relationship to the creation of man and woman. Woman being described as a helper is also a key concept we would do well to understand. The term helper is ezer and it is used in a few other places in Scripture. But here is the kicker, each time that it is used it is used to describe God as our helper, someone who was necessary for us to pursue and continue on in our lives. The helper that God creates is just as equally made in God’s image as the man that God creates in chapter 1.

John begins his Gospel with his own account of creation. Notice the theological truth that he begins with which is necessary to our understanding of the Trinity. The Son, the Word of God, is present in creation. Without the Word, without Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, the Son, creation would not and did not occur. We often misunderstand the Trinity in a modalist perspective. The Son is relegated to the first century and never seen or heard from again. That is not our belief. The Son was present from the very beginning. The Son, Jesus, was God fully and completely and without any hesitation. Anything less than that is heresy. This includes the presence of the Son in creation itself.

“Thy word is a lamp unto my path and light unto my feet.” Psalm 119:5

What a great way to start our Bible reading challenge. We will be together now for the next 9 months reading through Scripture and trying to figure out together how what we consider and believe to be the Word of God actually has the ability to impact and change our life for the good forever.

It is a great Psalm to start off our challenge for a number of reasons. I get to teach some of you a new word today: acrostic. That means simply that each section of the Psalm, so about every 8 verses or so, begin with the next letter of the alphabet. Now, as you are reading it you are probably saying to yourself that no, it doesn’t begin with A and then the 9th verse begins with B. Well, just in case we forget, the Old Testament, and so the Psalms as a whole, were originally written in Hebrew and not in English.

Psalm 119 also happens to be the longest of all the Psalms and yet it maintains the most consistent them: I love the law of the Lord. If you remember in the New Testament Jesus while he is in a jam packed house is told by those around him that his family is waiting for him outside. He responds by saying: “Who is my family but those who keep my commandments?” Matthew 12:48-50. Keepings the commandments of the Lord is mandatory for those who want to be followers of Jesus.

Now, let’s be clear, being a disciple of Jesus Christ is not meant to be a legalistic endeavor. I remember when I was a senior in high school and not wanting to have anything to do with Jesus. I was a clear cut atheist. I thought it was all made up. The main reason why I was fighting a personal relationship with Jesus was because I thought that it was a list of rules. Following the commandments of the Lord was to me a prison into which I did not want to put myself. On January 14, 1986 the Word of God came to me, yes literally, and told me: stop living for yourself.

It was then that I realized the freedom that I had in following Jesus’ commandments. It led me not to a life of slavery to sin, but rather to freedom in Christ. That was when I took upon myself my favorite Bible verse found in John 8:32 where Jesus tells those who doubted him: You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free. Reading the Word of God reminds us of the new life that we have in Christ when we accept him as personal savior and as we live our lives in freedom.

I am so looking forward to taking this journey with you over these next 9 months as we dive into the God’s Word.