Reading from Monday, April 10

Yes, I fell asleep again last night before even thinking about the blog. My apologies.

Reading for May 10
1 Samuel 8:1-9:27

Alright - at this point, Samuel has advanced in years. He appoints his two sons to be the judges over Israel, but they are corrupt and they don't follow God's teachings. Soon the Israelites begin to cry out for a king.

This is something that never really crossed my mind when reading this. Every other nation surrounding Israel had a king to lead them into battle, while the Israelites had this loose system of judges. The envy must have always been there seeing other nations with big, important kings with jewels and fancy clothes and stuff. Obviously, they were overlooking the fact that God was their king and was bigger and more glorious than any human king could ever hope to be.

Samuel warns the people that if they appoint a king, he will be unjust, he will enslave the people and take nearly everything from them. They ignored reason and continued to demand a king. This sounds somewhat familiar too - large group of Jews, demanding something, ignoring reason...kind of death-of-Jesusy wouldn't you say?

So Samuel goes to God saying that the people want a king. God tells Samuel to look out for a Benjaminite who will be coming to his town the following day - he will be the king of Israel. This man was Saul. Saul shows up exactly where God told Samuel he would and Samuel has him and his servant to the "high place" (temple I suppose) for dinner.

I gave a talk on Saul at ORB a couple years back - I'll see if I can dig up the slides and post them tomorrow.

John 6:22-42
It's official - John is my favorite Gospel. Every sentence is packed with so much history and depth that I could probably spend a whole year blogging just in John alone. OK - so a couple of really neat things here:

²⁷Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.

Again - this communist/socialist ideal that Jesus preaches about not working to gain physical things but the spiritual fulfillment of knowing Jesus and knowing God. The people ask him what kind of work is required to achieve this food. He replies:

"The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent."

Now, I don't know if this was intentional, but I think it was. The word 'work' is very important to me here. You need to work at believing in Jesus. It's not something that you can just blindly accept - especially today - 2000 years removed from Jesus walking the earth. And if you do blindly accept it without challenging your beliefs or 'working' toward a deeper understanding, I would challenge you to assess your beliefs and do some thinking about where they come from. This is a daily challenge to believe in the one God sent and to follow everything he has instructed us.

Then, since Jesus has made this big bread analogy, the crowd brings it around to the manna which God provided to the Israelites in the desert. Jesus replies:

 ³²[...]"I tell you the truth, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. ³³For the bread of God is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world."

So in the same way that God physically sustained his people in the actual desert with bread from heaven, he spiritually sustains his people - us - while we are in the spiritual desert with his son from heaven.



Psalm 106:32-48
Another history psalm. Nothing too exciting here.

Proverbs 14:34-35

 ³⁴ Righteousness exalts a nation,
       but sin is a disgrace to any people.
 ³⁵ A king delights in a wise servant,
       but a shameful servant incurs his wrath.

Yes yes. Have a day. Nice one.