Reading from Friday, July 23

Aww yeah, son.

Reading for July 23
2 Chronicles 8:11-10:19
This reading focuses on the greatness of King Solomon. The details here reveal the depth of his wealth, the width of his wisdom and the height of his power. It talks about how a queen from another nation came to visit and was very impressed with how smart he was. We see that Israel was never so prosperous as they were under Solomon.

If you remember, though, Solomon turned away from God in his old age. It's interesting that that detail is omitted from Chronicles, instead they kept only the good things about him. But I would argue that this wealth and plenty that Sol enjoyed was what ultimately led to his downfall. As wealth increases, so does pride, which quickly turns to arrogance and greed. One of Jesus' main messages was to get rid of your money, and to see such opulence in a biblical character is something that really sticks out when you think about Jesus' message of living a life of humility.

It makes me think that when Solomon asked God for wisdom and knowledge and he got wealth and power in addition to that, he should have respectfully declined those gifts. I wonder if God gave them to Sol as a test to see if he could handle the burden of wealth and power, and clearly he couldn't. And ultimately the split Kingdom that we read about in Kings (Judah and Israel) was Solomon's fault. God doesn't remove the promise he made to David, but he diminishes it slightly.

In the end, I think that God pushing David's family into a smaller land was the right choice; remember that Jesus kind of came from David's lineage. I think God was intentionally humbling the small family of Judah - which would produce the savior of the world, who is the model of a humble human being. He saw that the power which was given Solomon was too heavy to carry without succumbing to the negative fruits that go along with it. 

Romans 8:9-25
OK

⁹You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you. And if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ. ¹⁰But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness. ¹¹And if the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit, who lives in you.

This is incredibly heavy and I have read it 5 or 6 times and still don't fully grasp it. Let me see if I can think through it.

OK starting at verse 10: if you are a Christian, your body is theoretically dead because of sin. I would assume that means that in the same way that God and sin are like oil and water, Jesus and sin are like oil and fire. So sin cannot exist in your body if Christ is within it. In this case I think Paul is also using "sin" and "the body" interchangeably.

Now verse 11: Your body can actually be brought back to life through the spirit which brought Christ to life from the dead. Why is this important? I think Paul makes this distinction because it is important for us to live in this world and bring God's message and love to others, and if our bodies are "dead" that wouldn't be possible. We need to balance our worldly, sinful selves with our ethereal, godly selves. Obviously a big part of that is actually attaining an ethereal, Godly self, but yeah...there it is.

Psalm 18:16-36
This is part two of the Psalm we looked at yesterday. This reveals a much more gentle, loving God because he is interacting with David in this half, not David's enemies. What's interesting here is this bit:


 ²² All his laws are before me;
       I have not turned away from his decrees.
 ²³ I have been blameless before him
       and have kept myself from sin.

Now, this was written right after David escaped from Saul trying to kill him, so at this point he hadn't done the whole Bathsheba thing, so he very well could have been blameless under OT law. I thought at first that this was a prophetic Psalm about Jesus, but it doesn't really fit if you read the whole thing.

Either way, David continues to be my favorite character.

Proverbs 19:26
Pretty straightforward here:

²⁶ He who robs his father and drives out his mother
       is a son who brings shame and disgrace.

Love.