Tuesday 7 June

2 Samuel 11:1-12:31

Of all the despicable things we have seen in the Old Testament so far, this one has got me the most.  David seemed different.  I’d taken him to heart.  He seemed compassionate and generous and full of real, honest devotion to the Lord.  Of course I knew this Bathsheba travesty was coming up but the sheer force of David’s depravity has still taken me by surprise.  Uriah was one of David’s top 30 soldiers, he was one of David’s Mighty Men.  He came from a foreign land but he set an example to all Israel in his utter devotion to David and to God.  But David, the recipient of untold mercies from God, had him isolated and betrayed by the men he had sweated and bled for. And Bathsheba was maybe even more of a victim.  Compelled to obey the king’s command she then saw her husband killed and her bastard child die.  And the destructive consequences of David’s sin spread far wider than that.  The whole kingdom will shatter  as one who is close to David will usurp him and the sword will never depart from his house.  Sin is never victimless.  People always suffer from it, especially when leaders sin.  It was started with Adam when he unleashed the tyranny of sin.  The wages of sin is death.  It always has been and it always will be.  This is why the Lord is so against it.  That is why we need to talk about it, no matter how uncomfortable it may feel.  I pray that we learn the lesson from David.  I pray that none of us will ever have to hear those words “you are the man...”

Acts 4:1-22

Peter and John were unschooled, ordinary men.  I think we sometimes forget that.  It makes me sad when people feel disempowered because they are not very “academically-minded”.  Education level counts for pretty much nothing in the kingdom.  Peter and John were unschooled, ordinary men and it didn’t seem to hold them back too much.  The thing that got tongues wagging and knees bowing was the outstanding miracle that Peter and John performed.  Undeniable displays of the power of God - that is what the kingdom is built upon.  There is no-one in London who could be held back in the kingdom because of their level of education.  But, lest we swing the pendulum too far in the other direction let me just say that Peter and John seriously knew their bibles.  Barely a talk goes by where they don’t summarise and quote great swathes of scripture.  And, flipping heck, the most academically-minded people on the planet struggle to grasp some of the concepts that John lays out in the prologue to his gospel.  They may have been unschooled and ordinary men but they seriously cooked The Book.  They may have been unschooled and ordinary men but they seriously believed in the power of words.  You see, while the Sanhedrin were focussing on who Peter and John were, Peter and John were focussing on who Jesus was.  Their actions weren’t so much a response to how they saw themselves but a response to what they saw and heard from God.  When we focus on God, when we read his book and fellowship with him in prayer then suddenly who we are doesn’t seem to matter so much, we just get caught up in admiration and wonder and a desire to obey and speak about this incredible, life-saving God.

Psalm 71:1-8

Me coming forth from my mother’s womb is not an image I particularly like to dwell on.  It makes me feel a little uncomfortable if you know what I mean.  But to think that God had my back even way back then.  Well, there is definitely some comfort in that...