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I would like to make a sermon on “The Burden Of the Blessing.”  What an interesting God we serve.  Joni is in a wheel chair and Hugh Hefner is in a velvet cocoon and I know where they are both headed, but if Hugh sees the light on his death bed, he is in.  I know Joni knows where she is headed, but I am sure that she can still cry herself to sleep at night and wish God would give her a day off.

But God came to earth and went screaming through the birth canal, and wished that he had one disciple who didn’t irritate him and entered heaven with a thief who changed his direction. the thief’s, life in a few seconds on a cross.  He didn’t have a place to sleep and went hungry on occasion.  Nothing he did seemed to make his disciples or the multitudes happy.  What if the thief knew the cross was in his future.  Since he was human, he might have wondered whether it was worth it.

Job, Moses, Jeremiah, the whole bunch.  Poor Jeremiah.  Every time he did what God wanted him to do, he wound up in a well up to his armpits in mud.  Moses leaves a comfortable, actually two, comfortable existences to pry the Israelite loose from Egypt,  leads them grumbling and trying to stone him, to the edge of the promised land and then hits the wrong stone with the wrong stick.

I don’t question for a minute that God is right and good and what happens is the best, but I am more than a little uncomfortable with some books and preachers who say that a life pleasing to God will leave you with an angelic family, a paid off mortgage, and vibrant good health.  How could we have missed the message that seems to be on every page of the Bible.  A very good, Bible believing scholar, wrote a book about Paul and speculated that his “thorn in the side” might have been migraines induced by the vision on the road.  He didn’t seem to see the irony in that.  I know Paul did not regret the vision, but probably prayed in tears to make the pain go away.

The pinnacle of the Temple was generally considered to be Solomon’s Porch.  It was of marvelous height overlooking the Kidron valley.insomuch that if any one looked down from the top of the battlements, or down both those altitudes, he would be giddy, while his sight could not reach to such an immense depth.” -Josephus Antiquities, Book 15, Chap.11:5

I have often heard that the point of the contest between the devil and Jesus involved trying to fly in order to impress the worshipers.   Instead, I am fascinated by the location of the Kidron valley

The Kidron Valley into which the devil invited Jesus to leap was a important location in Isreali history.  Some believe the distance to have been seven hundred feet.  It was the place where broken idols, unclean things, and the blood of the offerings were disposed of.  It is almost as if Satan wants him to leap into the darkness, by orders of the prince of darkness rather than the victory of the Messiah.

The Jews were rather fixated on cleanliness.  Understandable in a desert people.  The High Priest who was to offer the sacrifice on the day of Atonement was especially watched and examined for anything that could damage his sacrifice.  One interesting incident in Jeremias’ book on Jerusalem, he relates that spittle was unclean and the high priest Simeon in 17 AD was rendered unclean the night before the sacrifice because he contacted the spittle of an Arab.  Another had to take his place.

The Bible is careful to relate that Jesus was spit upon.  That would have rendered him unclean and according to contemporary Jewish law, totally unclean.  Interesting.  I wonder what this has to do with the healing of the blind man.

Zechariah 11:12-13

English Standard Version (ESV)

Thirty pieces of silver is the price Zechariah got for his work. He takes the coins and throws them “to the potter”.  In , 30 pieces of silver was the price of a slave.

When the chief priests decide to buy a field with the returned money, Matthew says that this fulfilled “what was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet.” Namely, “They took the thirty silver coins, the price set on him by the people of Israel, and they used them to buy the potter’s field, as the Lord commanded me” (Matthew 27:9–10).

Jeremiah 32

Exodus 21:32

English Standard Version (ESV)

The coins may also be defining “Jesus’ death is a ransom, the price paid to secure a slave’s freedom,” and that the use of the blood money to buy a place to bury the rootless (Matthew 27:7) may hint at the idea that “Jesus’ death makes salvation possible for all the peoples of the world.

There may also be a reference here to the Cain and Abel story where the older brother kills his younger and the bloody field cries out to God.

According to Edersheim in his book on the temple, the houses in Jerusalem were considered to belong to God.  On an event like Passover, travelers could come to Jerusalem and knock on a door and ask for a room.  The resident of the house, if he had room, was obligated to take them in.  After all, it was not his house, but God’s.

This information, although interesting, is perhaps much more important than we are aware.  We feel like we own things and sharing is voluntary.  The Bible and the Biblical tradition seem to teach that our clothes, our food, our homes, our transportation, our church buildings belong to God on a very temporary loan.  If our brother has need and we have what he needs in our possession, we are not being generous in giving it to him, but good stewards.  Often, we understand that good stewards means that we lock our doors and are more than a little careful when handing out God’s possessions.

There is a long and somewhat monotonous argument in religious communities about the meaning of the verse in Isaiah which prophesies that a virgin shall conceive and bear a child.  Some folks think that the word should be translated as “young woman.”  Forgetting for a moment the rather obviousness of a saying that a young woman would bear a child, the verse has been used to question the link to Mary’s pregnancy as a miraculous event.

Apparently, the battle has been rather lengthy.  At one point, Martin Luther was questioned or perhaps challenged on the point.  According to the story, Luther dumped a palmful of money on the table or podium and announced that it belonged to anyone who could find an instance in ancient literature in which the word does not apply to a virgin.  The tradition is that the prize was never collected.  The word is used several times elsewhere in the Bible, but never to a girl old enough to have a child.

Interesting.

Most of the pictures of the cross are very misleading.  The cross is a towering structure with the crosspiece fastened in an indeterminate way.  If he carried it, how could it fit so neatly in the space between the top and the bottom vertical beam.  The actual cross was T shaped.  The Romans needed something simple because of the number of crosses they needed to execute folks.  Six thousand of the followers of Spartacus were crucified along the highways of Italy.

The prisoner was crucified naked, with his legs folded up under him so that his heels were against his rump.  Often a nail was positioned behind him so that each movement was further agonizing.  The cross was supposed to be lower than the people who viewed the crucified person.  It was easier to mount him on the cross that way and also everyone who passed could look down on him rather than up to him.  A fine point of Roman etiquette.

When someone mentioned to me that the crucifixion in the movie “The Passion of Christ” was too gruesome, it struck me that we have little idea how much he suffered for us.

This particular lecture on DVD focuses on the names of God and His earthly son.

The Naming of the Child

Jesus was born in the Galilee.  When Jesus was growing up, the Galilee was being ruled by Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, a cruel tyrant whose domain was just the western Galilee.  The principal cities were Sepphoras,  Capernaum, and Tiberius.

The child was “given the name” Yeshua, Jesus, which meant that he would save his people from their sins, an interesting name.  The people of Galilee were looking for deliverance from the avarice of Herod, who, along with the leaders of Jerusalem taxed people by removing up to 50% of their income.  This in a land where even the whole of their income was barely enough to keep them alive.  A name in those days was a belief in the probable purpose, character, destiny, or identity of the child.  If that changed, the name was often changed.

The Temple site is deeply rooted in Biblical history.  The geography of Jerusalem is interesting.  On Mountain Moriah Abraham and Isaac carried out the Akedah.  The Akedah is one of the keys of  both the Jewish and Christian faiths.

In Genesis 22, God orders Abraham to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice.  After Isaac is bound to an

altar, the angel of God stops Abraham at the last minute, saying “now I know you fear God.” Abraham sees a “sacrificial ram held captive by some nearby bushes and he sacrifices the ram instead of his son.

According to many authorities, Isaac was well able to resist his aged father.  He must have climbed on to the altar voluntarily.  A Messianic foreshadowing?

The basic problem with basic Bible study is that the Bible must be read and understood in context, as a whole.  We have come  to understand this as when we are preaching on a text that we read the whole chapter.  What it means really is that we have to interpret the verse in terms of the whole Bible, not just the chapter or the parts we have read, the whole Bible.

The other problem has to do with translation.  Hebrew is a very small language and most translators pick the word that is traditionally chosen or at least closely related to it.  So if the word tabernacle can also mean body, when God tells Moses to put together a tent so he can dwell among them in a tabernacle, we don’t often realize that this could also mean that God wishes He had a body so that he could live among His people  The translation doesn’t always make this a possibility.  The fact that the word used as a post to hold up the tabernacle is also used as the word for Adam’s rib is fascinating.

I would like in this blog to explore the Bible as a spiritual document, but also as one of the world’s most subtle and complex literary document.  This may offend the religious because they feel that it somewhat diminishes the document’s religious value, and it pushes away the literary because they feel as if the mere possession of the book indicates a wild eyed religious fanaticism.

I will probably publish this introduction periodically so that there will be no misunderstanding of what I am doing.