Friday 11 February

Exodus 9:1-10:29

What I find fascinating about this narrative is that it doesn’t give any indication as to what the Israelites were making of all of this.  As the passage says, the purpose of these plagues was to convince the Israelites that Yahweh is the Lord and that his name should be proclaimed in all the earth. And yet, the only mindset that we get insight into is that of Pharaoh and his officials.  I wonder why this is?  My guess is that to focus on the faith levels of the Israelites after every plague would have misrepresented what was going on here.  The Israelites are not the major players in this drama - they are just the passive recipients of the dynamic deliverance of their God.  It’s like the Lord is on fire, driving forward his agenda with such relentless determination that every other character can just stand and gawp.  This is what I think our religious experience should be; seeing God doing amazing things for the sake of glory and to the benefit of his people.  If our attention is most often on ourselves, for whatever reason, I suspect we have walked away from the biblical direction for our faith.

Matthew 26:69-27:10

I love the way Matthew name-checks Jeremiah here, grabbing a slightly obscure section of the wailing prophet and pulling it right into the centre of the Jesus story.  It’s like the whole of the Old Testament witness is drawn like a magician’s cloak around the life of Jesus, and then, after an appropriate drum roll, the new and startling work of God is plucked out from the middle of it.  This is important.  For Matthew, there is no discrepancy between Old Testament and New Testament, no “mean God” followed by “loving God” or however people have wanted to talk about it.  Matthew and the other New Testament writers, including Paul, all saw Jesus as a Jewish saviour who was bringing to culmination the redemptive work of God that had begun with Abraham (or perhaps Noah, or even Adam!).  God has been the same all the way, even if the degree to which he has revealed himself has grown.  We need to fully buy into this or else we are in great danger of wrenching Jesus out of his historical and theological context and turning him into whatever we may want him to be.  And that, in part, is what Judas appears to have done, viewing Jesus as a rabbi rather than as the Messiah of God, and then acting upon this understanding to catastrophic effect.  By the time he realised what he had done, it was too late for him.  To protect against this we need to mine the scriptures, become au fait with the whole counsel of God and continue to seek Jesus in a worship-filled life.   Doing this will continually open us up to voice of the Spirit who will lead us into all truth.

Psalm 20:1-9

“We will shout for joy when you are victorious and will lift up our banners in the name of our God”.  Firstly, what an amazing thing that people would be so delighted in another’s success that they would whoop and holler about it.  And, secondly, who would have thought that banners were a biblically-prescribed method of worshipping our God?? I think I better nip down the shops in readiness for Sunday...