Saturday 23 July

Hosea 8:1-9:17

God is not that bothered about what we say.  Not, at least, compared to what we sow.  Israel cried out “O our God, we acknowledge you!” but God was not impressed - he could see the Israelites sowing wind.  Their lips were belied by their hands.  They said they were committed to Yahweh but their fingers were constructing calfs.  They said they were the house of the Lord but their arms were serving other god.  So God let them reap the whirlwind.  God caught them out in their deceit.  I don’t know whether the Israelites knew they were being deceptive or whether they really thought they were acknowledging God.  I suspect they thought they were doing OK, they may have thought they were giving God his due.  But they were spending time, money and effort pursuing all sorts of other desires, giving themselves to agendas that hadn’t been written by the Lord.  God hasn’t got much time for syncretism.  He doesn’t fancy being one of our gods among many.  He wants to be the apple of our eye.  He wants to be the single greatest priority in our lives.  He wants us to spent our time, money and effort on him, not scatter it hither and thither like a blustering wind.  If we bring him genuine worship then he will lavish us with joy.  But if we don’t, well, then he will whirlwind us around all over the place.  God will not be mocked; he will let us reap exactly what we sow.

Romans 8:1-17

Wowzers.  This heady passage is one of the richest in the whole New Testament.  We’ve been slogging our way up the mountain and now a dazzling vista opens up before us.  Eye-lid smacking beauty assaults us from every side.  We saw we were all in a dire predicament.  We saw death was the only way out.  But we saw that through faith we could die without dying and live again in the presence of our Lord.  We saw that in this new life we are declared righteous, that we are forever pure and blameless in God’s sight.  But now we press on.  Now Paul leads us to the sparkling conclusion of his argument.  Now we see the even greater wealth of the inheritance of this life.  God does not just declare us righteous - he makes us so.  He doesn’t just tell us to act like slaves of righteousness - he equips and empowers us to do so.  And he doesn’t just equip and empower us from the sidelines.  He’s not just a great cheer-leader or a smiling, helpful manager.  He hoiks up his tunic, he whips off his ephod and he whisks himself right up into the core of us.  He sets up home in our beings.  We have him.  Helping us.  Giving us life.  This is the same Spirit who tapped a corpse on the shoulder, slipped inside the decaying cells and the sprung him out of the guarded tomb.  This is the same Spirit who wasn’t remotely impeded by a body 2-days-in-the-grave.  This is the same Spirit who took the most remarkable human who had ever lived, a human who had pulled immense crowds from all over his nation and all the surrounding lands, a human who had spoken sublime words and performed inexplicable deeds and - to put it crudely - had made him better than he was.  This Spirit took Jesus beyond just restoration to life.  He filled him with a fuller life, a life that enabled him to walk through walls.  This Spirit took Jesus beyond being just human to being a child of the Kingdom of God.  And this Spirit will do the same for us.  The Spirit will make us of that breed - the breed of the kingdom.

Proverbs 17:25-18:6

“Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent”.  Oh.  Now I’m starting to regret doing this blog.