Tuesday 10 May

Judges 10:1-11:40

What is wrong with the Lord?  It says that “he could bear Israel’s misery no longer” (10:16) but this sappy, sentimental approach to life is doing Him some harm.  He could be enjoying the bliss of perfect relationships and absolute trust and yet he’s hanging around with that lot.  It’s like a cheetah choosing to run at the speed of a wounded woodlouse.  Why would he not just cast them adrift and go find (or make) himself a new gang?  The only answer can be love.  Deep love.  Deep unquenchable love that can never be swayed.  The Lord has carved his people into his heart and and can no more deny them than we could use a rubber to remove a scar.  Israel has been unfaithful with every single salesman who has flown into town and yet the Lord still can’t kick her out of the marriage bed.  This is the greatest overture of this book, this is the defining image of our faith - a God weak with love for his people.  A Father besotted with his children.  A King wholly wedded to the benefit of his subjects.  A lover unable to resist the allure of his bride.  And what a strange allure it is.  Baffling in fact.  Even when we, as God’s people, seek to respond to this love we mess it up.  Jephthah was so full of desire to please the Lord and yet, like a tragic fool, he lost sight of what the Lord actually wanted and murdered his daughter for the sake of a vow.  If only he had read Leviticus 27 he would have known the Lord’s take on such a situation.  Many of us find ourselves in similar situations, suddenly realising the foolishness of our actions and the extent of our brokenness.  But that should never cast doubt on the depth of His love or on the force of his affections.  He cannot bear our misery.  He is a God weak with love for us, his people.

John 6:25-59

John has made Jesus big in our eyes.  He has unveiled the extent of his miraculous works, his claims of authority and his claims of identity.  For those who are convinced, the burning question is what we should do about it.  What does it mean to “come to Jesus” and receive “eternal life”?  We get a good squint into this here.  First of all eternal life is like perpetual nourishment.  It is an actual experience that actually strengthens us.  In that, it is profoundly satisfying.  It is life.  Real life.  Life free from longing for more of things.  Life free from fear of loss.  Life looking towards a greater future; a future of resurrection.  It is also life defined by intense and, in many ways offensive, intimacy with Jesus.  And that brings us onto what it means to “come to Jesus”.  Coming to Jesus is believing in him but that doesn’t quite hit the right note for our modern ears.  You would be unlikely to say that you believe in chocolate-chip cookies but you would be doing the same with Jesus as you do with them - drawing them into your very body so that there is no longer any distinction between you and them.  Feasting on them with delight and abandon.  If that sounds a little bizarre when talking about Jesus, it would have been even more so for his contemporaries, obsessed as they were with avoiding any consumption of blood.  But it needs to be shocking.  It needs to jolt us out of our tendency to keep Jesus at arms length and maintain a good working relationship with him.  That is not enough.  That sells short what eternal life really is.  It is remaining in Jesus.  Not beside him or behind him but in him, feeding on him for our very sustenance.  He is our daily bread.  Intimacy with him is what gets us through.  Permanent and profound pressing into Jesus.  That is the work that the Lord requires.

Psalm 59:1-8

I’m continually struck by how the psalms were actually born out of real life and the truths that they contain - that God is a protecter and deliver etc - are realities that have been tried and tested in intense and difficult situations.