Exodus 33:7-34:35
Sometimes you come across a bit of the bible that is dripping with so much juice that you just don’t know where to start sucking. For me, this is one of those bits. You could spend decades meditating on God’s names in this passage “The LORD - I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion”, “The LORD, The LORD, compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin...” and “Jealous”. Maybe I should be writing about those - I try to keep my focus on what the passages are saying about God rather than about people - but I can’t help feeling that it would be a crime not to look at the interaction between Moses and his God. The thing just sounds so extraordinary, a bit like a man and his lovable, loyal dog - and I’m not sure who sounds more like the dog. From one angle it’s like you see God wagging his tail and bounding up to Moses, licking his face and curling up alongside him. From the other angle you see Moses straining every sinew to search for his master, whining with longing to be allowed to stay with him and taking himself to the edge of starvation just to obey his commands. It utterly reeks of intimacy. And it’s all the more extraordinary when we think that this is under the old covenant, before the access to God has really been opened up by Jesus. This face-to-face relationship must surely be available to us now? I think I need to build a tent.
Mark 7:1-30
An interesting chapter in Mark as the brackets show the book was written for non-Jews, possibly as an early evangelistic document that was handed round to some of the Pauline churches. But that, I fear, is a slight distraction from the main thrust of the passage. I think the big punch being pulled by Jesus is to accuse the Pharisees of denying the seriousness of the Fall. For them, using lots of soap and avoiding dodgy kebabs (OK so this is a major paraphrase but I hope it makes a point) was sufficient to walk through life in a righteous manner. They were, in effect, suggesting that the Fall was nothing more than an intrusion on life that could be managed away through some good self-help principles. But this is a gross deception and a horrific distortion of the teachings of the bible. Genesis 3 teaches that the Fall was not just an intrusion on life but a complete corruption of it. Jesus affirms this, showing that people are not the victims of the problem but they themselves are the problem. Only by swapping people’s hearts for something else will solve this crisis. Can I say, at the risk of offending loads of people, that I think Christian culture and the church is hugely at risk of under-playing the seriousness of the Fall. I get a sense that we believe simply demonstrating a good life and, when asked, talking about the practices that God desires will be enough to save the world around us. But it won’t. It absolutely won’t. Receiving tips and hearing ideas (even divinely inspired ones) will only help people appear more together but, unless they can swap their hearts, they are still headed on a downward trajectory. We, as the church and the people of God, need to call people to the only One who can give them a spiritual heart-transplant and to beg them to ask Him for it. This is the mission of God as understood by Mark and this over-riding conviction is what drove him to write his gospel in the first place.
Psalm 25:8-15
“The Lord confides in those who fear him”. What an evocative image of relationship with the Lord. I want him to confide in me! O Lord please increase my fear.
