Monday 24 October

Jeremiah 50:11-51:14

It doesn’t end badly.  The bulk of this book has been the lifetime’s worth of rebukes and warnings that God has issued to Israel.  Even the good news has felt like bad news - encouraging people to go off into exile, to get used to being people’s slaves and to give up on their land and their temple.  But that is not how it ends.  While Babylon was victorious for a while, it is not the final conqueror.  While Israel was crushed for a generation, it will be redeemed.  Israel is being vigorously defended.  Babylon is on the way to being overthrown.  It, like all the other pretenders before and after it, is shown to be just loose change in the pocket of God.  God spends people like he wants.  And his driving motive - the pressing agenda that determines who he spends where - is to bring people into a place of rest in him.  He wants us to have peace in Him.  He wants us to find life in Him.  He wants our neighbours to have peace in Him.  He wants our neighbours to find life in Him.  That is what he is working for.  That is what the hardship is about.  He is vigorously working for our cause.  It doesn’t end badly.

2 Timothy 3:1-17

The verse is really well known.  It is a fantastic description of the scriptures.  But the context adds an extra dimension that I had not picked up on before.  It is a context of hostility.  We live in a world aggressively posed against us.  Men and women come to decry us, to deceive us and to persecute us.  There is trouble all round.  But we need not fear.  Our fortress is strong, our stance is firm.  If we continue in the scriptures then not only do we remain protected from attack but we advance.  We press deeper into righteousness, we become more thoroughly equipped.  These are beautiful words.  Like the greatest ever penknife in the pocket of a man lost in the jungle.  It has a map, it has tools to defend and to forage and to build and to clear.  It is the very provision of God not just for us to survive but for us to flourish and to build a camp and to draw others in.  It enables us to furnish them with the skills and tools they need to join the cause and to draw yet others in as well.  The scriptures are an incredible provision to us.  It’s great to be reading them every day.

Psalm 119:89-96

“Your commands are boundless”.  I hope he means boundless in what they provide rather than boundless in number.