Tuesday 29 November

Daniel 4:19-5:16

Now that is a serious brown-trousers time.  Belshazzar should have listened to his dad.  He should have just read his dad’s letter.  I know his dad had spent several years acting like an actual donkey but he still could have given his words some heed, especially after his sanity was restored.  But God - the One who does what he pleases with the people of the earth - gave him a spectacularly miraculous second chance.  God tried to summon Belshazzar into repentance by conjuring up some fingers and getting them to write a warning on a wall.  But Belshazzar acted more like a donkey than his dad ever did.  He watched this thing happen, his knees knocked together and he begged for someone to tell him what it meant.  But then, when Daniel interpreted, Belshazzar the donkey just rewarded Daniel with purple robes and didn’t make any effort to repent.  How could he not have repented?  How could he not have given his allegiance to the Most High?  How could he have seen such miraculous revelation and just made a purely human response - one that pretended to respond but actually didn’t respond at all to the content of the revelation and really was just a neat way of preserving his position?  But that, I guess, is a definition of sin.  That, in a less graphic but nonetheless equally-offensive way, is what we do every time we hear or read the word of God and just bat it away like a tennis ball.  The bible is clear about the consequences of such action.  God goes to huge length to call us to repent.

2 Peter 3:1-18

They keep on bleating on this Day of the Lord.  It’s almost as if it is a central part of their faith.  In fact it is almost as if it is THE central part of their faith that they build everything else around.  All this ‘wholesome thinking’ that Peter has been trying to stimulate (by the way, don’t you just love that slightly quaint phrase ‘wholesome thinking’?) seems to just be the canvas of the teepee... and the two ‘comings’ of Jesus seem to be the sticks.   And I worry that my teepee doesn’t have enough sticks.  I worry that I have leant away from thinking about the ‘last days’, and that I have not been the only one.  I worry that talk about the ‘last days’ has been dominated by people who use poor exegesis and over-active imaginations.  I have been profoundly challenged about this topic throughout the bible-in-a-year.  I really want to grasp what Peter and Paul and the early believers understood to be the trajectory of history, and the trajectory of their lives.  Because I think that we will always struggle to live out our faith effectively until we are convinced about the Day of the Lord.  

Psalm 135:13-21

We become what we worship.