Friday 4 February

Job 33:1-34:37

Elihu is an interesting chap.  He seems so caught up in his inferior social status and yet so convinced of his understanding of life.  I have quite a lot of sympathy for him having been (or maybe still being) a similarly arrogant youth.  I admire him for being so conscious of being “taken from clay” and for his desire to see Job cleared.  In many ways he seems to get closer to being an effective comforter than any of his elder companions.  And yet, he does fall down in his primary objective of accurately speaking on behalf of God.  I guess the problem for Elihu, and indeed for all of us human beings, is that our minds are fundamentally incapable of comprehending God as God - his ways are always above our ways and his thoughts above our thoughts.  I constantly have to fight against my desire to domesticate God and nail down all truth into a few memorable phrases.  He is, after all, so beyond us in every single way.  No matter how much we know, we always find more. I hope I can always have an openness to be surprised by the awesome nature and works of God.

Matthew 23:1-39

What an awful place to be. It can’t have been easy to have been on the receiving end of these stinging rebukes of Jesus.  Jesus’ willingness to tear down the corrupted old covenant has been growing and growing throughout his ministry.  He is now wielding a mighty sledgehammer and pounding away at the legs of Jewish religious practice with his over-riding rebuke “you shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces.”  He is driven by a desire, nay a demand, for the people of God to continually offer the kingdom of God to those around them.  His patience has worn thin and he will no longer tolerate the self-regarding, self-indulgent and self-obsessed attitude of the teachers of Israel’s law.  He is coming to pronounce woes on that way of doing religion.  And, in a hugely evocative hint about what’s coming, he declares that one is coming in the name of the Lord to shake things up and unleash the blessings of the age to come.

Psalm 18:25-36

The thing I love about God is that he doesn’t just act as our fortress and deliverer but that he actually spends time investing in us and making us better able to cope with life in the future.  He arms us with strength and trains our hand for battle and even makes our feet like the feet of a deer (quite why I’d want cloven hooves I have no idea).  God is not a disabling, restrictive rule-enforcer but a glorious supporter and encourager, empowering us and releasing us to suck all the juice out of life and to scale a few walls in the process.