Monday 13 June

2 Samuel 20:1-21:22

It’s a bit funny, this last section of 2 Samuel (which we look at over the next few days).  It feels a bit like sucking a gobstopper once all the flavour has drained out of it.  David no longer holds me in rapt attention - he certainly isn’t mastering Joab and, while he is preserving his position as king of Israel, you don’t get a lot of mention of God being at work.  When we do see some mention of God, it is in connection to this slightly cheek-straining episode of 7 men being sacrificed to the Gibeonites.  Altogether I sort of wish I’d spat out the gobstopper a couple of chapters back.  But that is the glorious perversity of our holy book and of our faith.  It never spins anything.  All the agonies and weaknesses and confusions of life are recognised and made plain.  Our God doesn’t need to ignore difficult bits.  He doesn’t have to pretend that the gobstopper always pings with flavour.  He is the God who sees our fallenness, who eyeballs our mediocre and insipid attempts at doing life and fires a volley of redemption and hope into the midst of it.  Our injustice or our cowardice or our laziness are not insurmountable obstacles to the glorious intentions of our God.  He can deal with all of life in all its messiness bringing all his love and all his life into all of our beings.  That is not to say that any of this fallenness is OK or in any way pleasing to God - that is the heresy that Paul strains to tackle in Romans.  And it is not to say that this painfulness of life is here to stay and that a bright future awaits - that is the heresy that Paul tackles in 2 Thessalonians.  But it is to say that nothing, not any little thing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.  He is too great and his love is too strong to let the consequences of the Sin of Adam separate us from himself forever.

Acts 8:4-40

When you accept the word of God you should be baptised in the name of Jesus to indicate your repentance from your former way of life.  I think we have messed with baptism.  I think we’ve lost faith in baptism.  Peter and John and Philip didn’t see baptism as something to consider when you feel you understand a good deal of what you have committed to.  Peter and John and Philip saw baptism as the demonstration of your repentance that brought you into the kingdom.  Maybe it is not baptism that we have messed with but repentance.  Maybe we have lost a bit of a sense of repentance being the defining feature of entry into the kingdom.  When you have accepted the word of God and been baptised you should be filled with the Holy Spirit to empower you for living in the kingdom.  I think we have mostly got the idea of being filled with the Holy Spirit but maybe we slightly marginalise it as being just about rattling and rolling and physical healing and prophecy.  The Spirit certainly brings those things, but the primary thrust of the Spirit is empowerment for the advancement of the kingdom - living well, having good relationships, preaching the word, pushing back the works of Satan.  The manifestation of the Spirit is simultaneously supernatural and natural; great signs and miracles and people living openly in good character and with a generosity towards others.  

Proverbs 14:25-35

A heart at peace sounds good.  I don’t want no rotting bones, that is for sure.