Tag: God’s plans

Who Wanted to Throw Jesus Off a Cliff? What Provoked that Reaction, and What It Might Say about Us

Jesus provoked the response that is in all of our hearts

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In Luke four, Jesus announced his public ministry in his hometown synagogue with these words:

“The spirit is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Luke 4:18-19

Good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, and freedom for the oppressed echoes Isaiah 61. “[T]he year of the Lord’s favor” echoes Leviticus 25, where Moses passed on the jubilee instructions given by the LORD to the LORD’s people.

Jesus was saying that these things foretold by Isaiah and the Jubilee instructions from Moses were fulfilled in him. Most of us are familiar with the way that many of the prophecies in Isaiah were fulfilled in Jesus, but we may not appreciate how Leviticus 25 takes on special significance – and controversy – in the life and ministry of Jesus.

Jesus announced his public ministry in a dramatic way in his hometown synagogue when he asked for the Isaiah scroll, opened it, read the words quoted above, and sat down. The people in the synagogue were initially “amazed at the gracious words” Jesus spoke. (Luke 4:22) By the end of the short exchange that occurred after that, the people wanted to throw Jesus off a cliff. (Luke 4:28-29) What happened?

The words of Jesus that provoked his hometown people to anger were these:

“‘Truly I tell you,’ he continued, ‘No prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.'”

Luke 4:24-27

Why did these two stories provoke the people to anger? Maybe the better question (the one we might not want to ask) is whether we are much different than they were?

The tension that played out in that Galilean synagogue when Jesus announced his ministry presages our modern reality 2000 years later. We still have a difficult time with the instructions, intentions and long-term plans that God announced when He told Abram that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through his descendants.

Today, I want to review some relevant provisions in Isaiah 61 and Leviticus 25 to explore why that reference did not sit well with God’s people. It wasn’t the references so much as the stories of Elijah and Elisha that he connected to them. Those stories – and what they suggest – may still not resonate well.

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Redeeming Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion

DEI has become a weaponized, pejorative term.

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Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion (otherwise known as DEI) has become a pejorative label for the “evils” of progressives that is a target of the Trump administration in their take down of government as it existed when Donald Trump took office. I don’t want to talk about politics. I want to address something to the Church in America. Something I think we need to think about prayerfully in these times.

I have been through a DEI session as a mandatory component of my professional continuing education. My experience is limited, so I discount it, but it will serve my purpose of introducing the subject I want to address.

Honestly, I would characterize the DEI session I went through as cringy. It was uber sincere, preachy, and not a little condescending. I also didn’t think it was very effective for these and other reasons. Well-intentioned, maybe. I will give it the benefit of the doubt, but I am afraid it rubbed me the wrong way – privileged white man that I am.

I can see how people outside the church might feel about the uber sincerity, preachiness, and condescension of Christians. It can be … well, cringy. I find it ironic that the progressive world (it seems to me) has overtaken the Church in self-righteous condescension, preachiness, and overall cringe in its own beliefs that it appears to be trying to cram down the throats of people it views as less than.

But, I digress. I want to take a step back and re-examine the ideas of diversity, equality, and inclusion. I am not going to do a deep dive, but I want to recapture these words that have been hijacked by political operatives and used alternatively as political bludgeons and pejoratives.

Diversity was created by God when he confused the languages of the people. God confused their languages because the people had unified together with one common language to make a name for themselves and to resist God’s instruction to be fruitful and multiply over the earth. God “confused the language of the whole world” to scatter people around the world as He originally intended. (Genesis 11:1-9)

From this, we see that God is in control, and He has a plan. Well, He is still in control, and He still has a plan. People are either working with Him, or they are working at cross purposes to His plan.

As Christians, we don’t ever want to be working at cross purposes to God! Diversity was God’s idea going all the way back to Genesis, and He shows where He is going with it in Revelation. This is the vision He gave John to share with the world to let us know His end game:

“After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.  And they cried out in a loud voice:

“Salvation belongs to our God,
who sits on the throne,
and to the Lamb."

Revelation 7:9

God’s plan is to bring all the nations, tribes, and languages back together in all their diversity! Every different nation, and every different tribe, in all their different languages – diversity. But, they will be unified in their worship of the Lamb who sits on the throne. (Notice, it isn’t the Lion of Judah who appears on the throne, but the Lamb of God.)

God celebrates the diversity He created by gathering all the nations, tribes, and tongues together from around the world where they were scattered. Diversity is not pejorative. It is something God created in His wisdom that we can celebrate as we worship Him in one voice and many tongues.

If we pray authentically as Jesus taught us, we pray, “Our Father, who is in Heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come and your will be done on earth as it is in Heaven!” If we are praying for God’s kingdom on earth – now – as it is in heaven, we cannot really mean that if we do not embrace the diversity that God created on earth.

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Thoughts on the Great Commission: Our Finite Tendency to Miss What God is Doing in Our Time

What are we missing? What dogmatic understanding have we clung to that is correct in some aspect, but not completely accurate?

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Go into all the world and tell the gospel to all creation

‭As I read through the New Testament this year as part of my daily reading plan, I have finished the Gospels, and I am well into the Book of Acts. As I read through the Gospels, I was mindful of the context in location, time period, and the history of the area and the people of Israel, surrounding nations, and the Greco-Roman world leading up to the time that Jesus walked the earth. I have also been mindful of the sweep of this history as it has played out since that time to the present day.

As a believer in the story of God revealing himself to human beings in this history that we continue to live into, I am also mindful that this time was pivotal. God becoming incarnate (taking on human form and fully living into His own creation), is the centerpiece of our story. It ties the story together from the beginning to the end that will play out into the future fulfillment of God’s ultimate plans.

Abraham and his descendants have been the focus of this story from the time that he heard God encouraging him to leave his family and homeland and strike out to a land God would show him, full of the promise descendants as numerous as the sands of the shores of the sea and the stars in the sky. But the story has taken an unexpected turn – unexpected, at least, for those descendants who have been living into this story for millennia by the time of Christ.

But it shouldn’t have been unexpected. That original promise to Abraham included blessing for all the nations of the earth. This was God’s plan from the beginning – from the creation of Adam and Eve and the command to “be fruitful and multiply.”

The covenant God made with Moses with those descendants of Abraham, however, took on a life of its own – at least as far as they perceived it. They were (more or less) faithful to that covenant. At least, they clung to that story despite their failings to be faithful and despite their myopic view of what God was doing.

It was myopic because they lost sight of God’s intention to bless the nations of the earth through them. This blessing was embedded into the original promise to Abraham, and it was always intended to be part of the story. Yet, they had lost that thread.

Thus, when God entered into the story to move it along and begin to work out the thread of His ultimate plan, they didn’t recognize Him. The people God chose through whom He would work out this plan unwittingly resisted it.

Yet, God in His sovereignty was not surprised by this. He used their resistance to move the story forward. Jesus knew this when he read from the Isaiah scroll in his hometown synagogue:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Luke 4:18-19

When Jesus told them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing”, they were not ready to receive it, though the fulfillment of it was long-awaited by them. Jesus knew their rejection of him would be the catalyst God would use to unfold the rest of the story:

“Jesus said to them, ‘Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’”

Luke 4:23

Jesus, the fullness of God in human form (Col. 2:9), knew he would die at the insistence of his own people, but this was meant to be.

“And being found in appearance as a man,
    he humbled himself
    by becoming obedient to death—
        even death on a cross!”

Pjilippians 2:8

God worked through this people He chose to prepare for the time He would enter the story, and their rejection of Him would be the turning point.

Continue reading “Thoughts on the Great Commission: Our Finite Tendency to Miss What God is Doing in Our Time” →

What Are We Missing in the Story of the Garden of Eden?

Why did God place the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden and forbid Adam to eat it?

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Once again, I am reading the epic of Eden by Sandra Richter. She takes the orthodox, traditional position that Eden was perfect, man fell, bringing God’s creation down with him, and God is redeeming man with creation so that man will live forever in perfection, again, after redemption is complete. I am indebted to her and other scholars, and I greatly appreciated her book.

I wrote recently, on the question, Was the Garden of Eden Really Perfect? With due respect to Sandra Richter, I am leaning in the direction of no, the Garden of Eden wasn’t perfect. I explain my thinking in the article linked in this paragraph, and today I want to explore something that may be missing from the traditional narrative (at least as I understand it).

Today, I am posing some questions that occur to me as I continue to read through Sandra Richter’s fine book. Why did God place the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden? Did God know men would eat from it? What is the point of the fall and the long road back to redemption?

I don’t claim to have all the answers, or at least not all the right answers. We may not know, and may never know, the answers in their nuanced details. I think that is ok, though we should strive to know as best as we can.

Maybe some things are not meant for us to know; or at least we are not meant to know that we know. We have a strong tendency to become proud and self-righteous and to start relying on our own understanding, rather than remaining humble before God and our fellow man.

Yet, I think God wants us to seek to understand. “It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.” (Proverbs 25:2) Thus, my article today is an attempt at better understanding God’s redemption story and searching out these things.

Surely, God had purpose in placing that tree in the garden, right? God is sovereign and all-knowing, right? Thus, I think the questions I pose today are good for us to consider.

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Why Did God Subject the World to Futility?

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Photo by Ken Gortowski

I want to focus on the following statements Paul made in his letter to the Romans:

“[T]he mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject[i] itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so…. 

Romans 8:7

“[C]reation was subjected[ii] to futility[iii], not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free ….”

Romans 8: 20-21

Life and death, the universe and all the “stuff” that is, ever was and ever will be are “in God’s hands”. That is another way of saying that God created everything. God is timeless and immaterial and has created all that is material out of nothing, including us.

But the material world, the world as we know it, is passing away (1 John 2:17), even from the moment it was created! That’s what science (the second law of thermodynamics) tells us also. The world has been has been “winding down” since the “Big Bang”.

Paul’s statement about the “futility” to which the world has been subjected suggests that futility is part of God’s ultimate plan, because it was done “in hope”.

If that doesn’t add up for you, I don’t think you are alone. I have been puzzling on it for awhile. What possibly could be the plan?

The trite response that “God’s ways are not our ways” falls short. We want to know, though perhaps it’s true that we may never completely understand. Still, I have some ideas that are informed by Scripture that I will try to lay out in this article.

Continue reading “Why Did God Subject the World to Futility?” →