Sunday 21 August

2 Chronicles 13:1-15:19

Asa had a slightly less flexible style of spiritual leadership than I would espouse (15:13 “all who would not seek the Lord ...were to be put to death”) but he had two characteristics that I would sell a kidney for; courage and an eager seeking after God.  And these sprung out of Azariah’s awesome prophecy “God is with you when you are with him”.  On one level it would hardly take a brain-surgeon to work that one out but, on another, spoken with the authority of a prophet at a time of national crisis, this was a dynamic rocket of encouragement blasted into the soul of the nation.  Get with God - seek Him earnestly and ceaselessly - and then trust that his mighty hand is with you - act with boldness and conviction to do what he bids.  I think I’m in need of a similar prophecy.  I need to be stoked up again to really earnestly seek God, to spend real time and expend real effort in prayer.  And, alongside that, I need to be fired again into acting boldly, speaking and showing the vibrant love of God that is found in Jesus.  For God is indeed with us, for we live and remain in him.

1 Corinthians 14:20-40

Bit of a choker this one.  The women keeping silent bit feels like a huge stinking kipper round the chops of our church practice.  So, should Ele Mumford have kept her trap shut last Sunday and deprived us of that word from the Lord?  Matthew Henry obviously would think so - “Our spirit and conduct should be suitable to our rank. The natural distinctions God has made, we should observe....The woman was made subject to the man, and she should keep her station and be content with it. For this reason women must be silent in the churches, not set up for teachers; for this is setting up for superiority over the man.”.  But there is good reason to think he is mistaken.  The whole section of this letter from chapter 11-14 focusses on how church meetings should work in order to build up everybody present.  If Paul believed women being silent in church was a fundamental principle of achieving this then he would have explained that right at the start of the section.  But he didn’t do that.  In fact, all throughout this section Paul has constantly used the Greek word that means “men and women” when talking about people giving prophecies or people receiving gifts from the Spirit to build others up or people eagerly desiring the gift of prophecy.  In the rest of the letter Paul has given every reason to suggest that he expected both men and women to fully engage in actively building up the rest of the congregation.  And, in fact, at the start of chapter 11 Paul talked specifically about how women should dress when they were giving prophecies in church.  So, the major thrust of this letter’s argument is strongly supportive of women actively engaging in church life in exactly the same way as men.  What Matthew Henry seems to have done is take two verses (14:34-35) out of their context and then use them as the primary statement on the topic despite all the contradictory statements of the rest of the letter.  I don’t believe that is a good way to approach the bible.  I think Ele Mumford can keep her speaking engagements for now.  But, this still leaves us with the tricky question of what to do with the two verses themselves.  Did Paul just have a funny turn when he wrote them?  Or is his writing just hopelessly inconsistent?  I’ve seen suggestions that some cheeky mega-chauvinist editor slipped the verses in at a later stage (I think this is very dangerous as there is no indication of this in the manuscripts) or that these instructions were particular to the Corinthian women and the way they were choosing to act at the time.  I’ve also seen people suggesting that these two verses are actually Paul quoting the Corinthian’s own statements in order to cut them down and show how they have missed the point (like he does with a different issue in 10:23).  I don’t know exactly what the answer is but I do know that I’ve got a nicely rotting kipper that I’m preparing to slap round Paul’s chops.  Why couldn’t he have been a bit clearer?  Thank the Lord that the whole bible is not this complicated...

Psalm 101:1-8

“My eyes will be on the faithful in the land”.  It’s always nice to focus on the positives.