Introducing the Psalms

The Psalms are the Bible’s model prayers.  About half of them are written by the famous king David, as well known as a musician and worshipper as he was as a warrior and giant-slayer.  There’s a psalm for almost every occasion we’re likely to experience in life.  In the Psalms, we find beautiful songs of praise, testimonies to God’s goodness, pleas for help, and questions asked when things don’t work out as they’re supposed to.  The Psalms are really meant to be prayed—sung even—rather than just read.  I find that I get the most out of them when I adopt them as my own, praying them as my own prayers.  I tend to pray them verbatim—doing so aloud and with gusto whenever possible seems to improve the experience immensely—but I know other people who use them as jumping off points into further prayer in their own words.  You might even want to try occasionally reading a psalm aloud together with someone else.  Take turns reading stanzas aloud.  At the end of the psalm—or in the middle of longer psalms—you could jump off-book to pray further about the ways the psalm connects to your own current life circumstances.

If you’re like me, praying two common types of psalms might initially make you a bit uncomfortable:

• Extravagant claims of righteousness—occasionally, I find myself gulping when, aloud and with gusto, I end up praying something like, ‘I have led a blameless life; I have trusted in the Lord and have not faltered’ (Psalm 26:1).  I wonder if the proverbial lightning will strike me down.  Despite the fears of divine punishment, a few things have kept me praying these absurd boasts:

o    First of all, I’ve noticed that my praying of these psalms take on a tone of aspiration: it makes me want to be the kind of person who can pray those things without blushing.  That seems like a pretty good result to me.

o    Secondly, I get the feeling that the psalmist doesn’t mean that he has never made any mistakes.  I think what he’s saying is that he has never abandoned God.  That’s still a pretty gutsy thing to say, but it’s not quite a claim to perfection.  While the ‘not faltering’ thing still kind of trips me up, I think I can honestly say that ever since I met God I’ve taken my relationship with God seriously.

o    Thirdly, I have a growing suspicion that these extravagant claims to righteousness have less to do with my moral report card, as it were, and more to do with how God sees me.  I noticed that sometimes in the same psalm the author will ask for God’s forgiveness and will make one of these audacious claims to utter blamelessness.  Once he’s confessed and been forgiven, it’s as if he never even took a mis-step.  Perhaps these psalms are saying that, because of God’s goodness, we can be certain that God likes us, sees the best in us, and wants the best for us.  If that’s the case—and I’m beginning to believe it is—then we can pray those crazy things with confidence and excitement.

• Calls for violent retribution—some of the psalms seem like they’re more suited to a Quentin Tarantino movie than to the Bible.  While I sometimes still find myself a little squeamish at the sheer bloodthirstiness of some of these ‘crush my enemy’ psalms, I’ve been surprised to find them among the most helpful psalms to pray, for a few reasons:

o    They help me prepare for the difficulties of the day—if I start the day with one of these psalms, it reminds me that not everything is going to go my way.  I can prepare myself, and ask for God’s help in facing the difficulties that are sure to come;

o    It’s a faithful and non-violent way to vent—it’s extremely liberating to unabashedly express just how I feel about the people who treat me poorly and unfairly.  But in the end, it’s harmless.  I’m expressing it to God, not letting it leak out in my interactions with people.  I express my anger and my desire for revenge; then I leave it in God’s hands to protect me and to vindicate me when appropriate.  Once I’ve expressed my feelings and left action in God’s hands, I can much more easily let it go;

o    I primarily focus the prayers on my true enemies—the New Testament author Paul tells us that our real enemies aren’t other people, but destructive spiritual forces whose entire purpose is to do us harm (Ephesians 6:12).  I have no problem praying that these enemies die a gruesome death.

Daniel lived during a very tumultuous time.  Egypt had long been the superpower in Daniel’s corner of the world, but was going through a period of decline just as three new rivals—Assyria, Babylon, and Persia—started to gain strength.  These four heavyweights spent about 200 years duking it out for supremacy.  Judah—Daniel’s homeland—was a tiny country which, to its great misfortune, happened to be located on the path the contenders’ huge armies  used to get to one another.  Because of this inconvenient placement, Judah was often used as a pawn in the larger nations’ strategies, a prize over which they fought, a convenient battleground for their wars, or simply a highway for advancing and retreating armies.

It was not just a political and economic disaster for the Jews (the residents of Judah), but a crisis of faith as well.  The Jews tended to think of their city Jerusalem as the Center of the Universe, but they discovered that it was actually something of a small, backwater town in comparison to the cosmopolitan capitals of the giant empires that surrounded it.  Furthermore, they had believed that their land could never be taken away and that Jerusalem could never be conquered, because the land was a special gift from God and the Jerusalem temple the unique dwelling place of God on earth; but here they were at the whim of these apparently godless nations.  These catastrophes provoked profoundly unsettling spiritual questions:

• Had God abandoned them?  Forgotten them?  Ceased to care about them?
• Were the gods of these other nations actually stronger than the one they had always thought of as the only true God?
• How would they relate to God without a Temple or the Promised Land?
• Is worshipping God worth it?

The story of Daniel can be seen as a response to these questions.  I think what we’ll find as we read it is that God cares more about and is more active in these other nations than the Jews would have ever imagined, but his interest in the Babylonians and the Persians doesn’t come at the expense of the Jews; he still cares very much about them, and, in fact, has bigger plans for them than ever.

Daniel is a young man from the Jewish upper classes who, when the Babylonians conquer Jerusalem, is captured by them and conscripted into their college for training imperial civil servants.  This forces Daniel to figure out how to faithfully follow God in an entirely unfamiliar setting.  As it turns out, God ends up using Daniel in amazing ways to influence several Babylonian and Persian emperors.

Daniel is remarkable among Old Testament books in that half of it—the second through seventh chapters—is written in Aramaic, while the other half is in the customary Hebrew.  Since Aramaic was the common language of the Persian Empire, it’s possible that the middle chapters were written in Aramaic for separate, wider distribution among the people of the empire (Baldwin, Joyce G.  Daniel: An Introduction and Commentary.  Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries 21.  D.J. Wiseman, ed.  Downers Grove: IVP, 1978, 29-30); meanwhile, the beginning and end, which deal more specifically with Jewish concerns, were left in Hebrew, the Jews’ local language.  Daniel is also split into two halves another way: the first six chapters tell Daniel’s story, and the second six chapters collect his dreams and visions.  We’ll be looking at the first half.

If you’d like to know more about Daniel, you can find a guided walkthrough of Daniel (and Esther) on the Leap of Faith page.

Joshua is the story of how the Israelites, after forty years of wandering around the desert, finally enter into the land God had promised them when Moses rescued them from oppression in Egypt.  Joshua was Moses’ protégé, and he took over Moses’ position after Moses’ death.

We read the first half of Joshua last Easter season.  This year, we’ll cover the second half.

This Promised Land isn’t vacant.  In fact, it’s rather heavily populated by this group called the Canaanites and other associated tribes (the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, among others).  The Israelites have to fight for the land.  They are commanded by God to drive many of these people out and to completely destroy others of them.  God-endorsed war and killing on such a large scale is, to put it mildly, quite disturbing to our modern sensibilities.  While it certainly doesn’t remove all of my discomfort, it does help me to know that God’s decision to destroy these people or take away their homes is not sudden or arbitrary.  Apparently, God has had a long-standing relationship with these people in which they have taken a particularly hardened stance against him.  God doesn’t take away their land out of convenience, or simply because he likes the Israelites better.  It’s a conscious act of judgment, done after long consideration rather than in sudden anger (Genesis 15: 16).  Like I said, I still find such complete judgment of an entire nation unsettling; but it’s at least helpful to know that God had his reasons, that he gave advance warning of the consequences of rejecting him, and that he showed a lot of patience before moving forward.

We’ll read about some of the wars the Israelites have with these people and the way the land is then split among the Israelites.  Then, we end with Joshua’s last words.

Ezekiel is one of the Bible’s prophetic books.  When thinking of prophecy, we can tend to focus on the idea of predicting the future.  It’s true that biblical prophets did at times speak about the future, but that really wasn’t their main point.  The prophets were like God’s official ambassadors to the people of Israel and Judah, and their function was to try to help the Israelites and Jews see current events through God’s eyes.

Ezekiel was God’s prophet during the period known as ‘the exile’—the same period in which Daniel lived.  Ezekiel, like Daniel, was himself sent into exile; he was one of a group of Jewish leaders taken hostage by the Babylonians at an earlier stage of the war.  So, he’s writing from Babylon, commenting on the events in Judah which will eventually lead to the fall of Jerusalem.

As I read Ezekiel, or any of the prophets, it always makes me curious about how God sees our own current events.  You might want to be on the lookout for similarities between our times and Ezekiel’s.  It might also be worth asking God if he has any prophetic words for you about things that are happening in our world today.

John was one of Jesus’ closest disciples, and with Peter he took on primary leadership over Jesus’ followers in the early years after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension.  These letters were probably written quite late in John’s life.  Though short and simple, they represent the distilled wisdom gained from a long life of successfully and happily following Jesus.  Apparently, the recipients of John’s letters have been distracted and confused by some persuasive teachers who have distorted or complicated Jesus’ message.  John encourages them instead to focus on the basics: if you trust in Jesus, love one another, forgive others, and ask forgiveness, you can expect a joyful life and a happy future.

Since John’s letters are so profoundly simple, it might be worth reading them in the same spirit.  Think of yourself as one of the ‘dear children’ to whom John is writing, and let yourself be encouraged by him into the peaceful life of love and joy John found in following Jesus.

Introducing Paul’s Letters

Among our New Testament readings for this season are several letters from Paul, an early follower of Jesus, to  three different churches: churches he was responsible for starting in Colossae and Corinth, and a church he was hoping to visit in Rome.

As we read these passages, it’s helpful to keep in mind that we are, in fact, reading letters—actually, we’re reading one half of an exchange of letters. Paul and his team would start new churches in new cities, and then rather quickly move on to other new cities.   They would leave each newly started church with the task of living out their newfound faith within the culture and circumstances of their city.  Inevitably, these new churches would encounter situations they didn’t know how to respond to, hear teachings that they didn’t know how to mesh with what they’d heard from Paul and his team, and run into other unexpected problems.  They would send messengers and letters to Paul asking for his guidance; and he would respond with the letters we now have in the Bible.  We don’t have a record of the letters and messages to Paul from these churches, but usually Paul’s responses gives us a pretty good idea of what’s going on; it’s sort of like overhearing one half of a phone conversation. 

Colossae was a city in the Roman province of Asia (modern-day Turkey).  It was sort of a small rust-belt city along the interstate.  As far as we know, Paul never himself visited Colossae.  A Colossian named Epaphras became a follower of Jesus through Paul’s preaching in Ephesus and spread the message to his hometown and some neighboring towns in the Asian hinterland.

Apparently, the Colossians had been influenced by an esoteric sect out of Judaism with some interesting ideas about angels.  These ideas have gotten in the way of the Colossians getting everything they could out of following Jesus; so Paul writes them to clarify his understanding of the relationships among Jesus, the angels, and human beings.  What Paul wants for the Colossians is more freedom than they are currently experiencing.

Corinth is a raucous, important port city in Greece.  As you’ll be able to tell from our reading, after Paul left Corinth, some disagreements sprang up between the Corinthians and him.  2 Corinthians is the second in a series of letters in which Paul tries to explain himself, reconcile the conflict with them, and correct some misunderstandings they’ve picked up about Jesus.

Romans is a letter of introduction.  Apparently, from his list of greetings at the end of the book, Paul has several friends who have over time made their way to Rome.  But he himself has not been there and is somewhat unknown to most of the church.  He is planning a visit, but before he arrives he feels the need to write this letter to lay out his beliefs about Jesus; apparently, some alarming misunderstandings of Paul’s message have reached the Romans.

In Romans, Paul pays a lot of attention to addressing what was a pretty major area of concern for the early church: the place of Judaism in following Jesus.  As increasing numbers of non-Jews (often called ‘gentiles’ in the Bible—gentile is an Anglicization of the Greek for ‘the nations’) became followers of Jesus, it brought up the question of what their relationship to Judaism was supposed to be.  Did Gentiles need to become Jews to be followers of Jesus?  If not, what relevance did the Old Testament have for these Gentile Jesus-followers?  And if non-Jews could become followers of Jesus, what did that mean about God’s previously unique relationship with the Jews?  It was a surprisingly thorny issue because it involved issues of culture, deep theology about the goodness of God and the reliability of his promises, and very practical questions of everyday living.

While the specific issue of non-Jews following Jesus is certainly less of a big deal nowadays, the big questions behind the issue—of culture, dealing with difference, how rules help us and hurt us, and the nature of God’s promises—all still seem pretty relevant.

We read most of Romans during Lent, our previous season.  During the Easter Season, we catch the conclusion of the letter.

In applying the lessons of this letter to our lives, it’s helpful to continually keep in mind that Paul is writing to specific groups of people with specific questions and concerns.  It’s not always possible or beneficial to apply Paul’s instructions without some interpretation.  Our culture and our concerns can be quite different from those of the ancient Romans.  In the effort to figure out how I can make use of Paul’s advice to someone else, I find a good sequence of questions is,

1.         What problem or question is Paul addressing?

2.         What is his answer to his audience?

3.         What’s the general principle behind his answer?

4.         Are there circumstances in my life where that principle would apply?

5.         What would it look like for me to take Paul’s advice?

Particularly when Paul is saying something confusing, troubling, or even offensive to me—often because of cultural differences between Paul and me—I find it extremely helpful to toss around this list of questions with a friend, or a group of friends, to see if together we can find out what value Paul’s advice has for us.

This book is unusual in that we don't really know who the author was, but know it was not Paul, the author of most of the other letters in the New Testament.  Hebrews doesn't exactly follow the pattern of a typical letter, either.  It's clear, however, that Hebrews was written primarily to new follows of Jesus of Jewish heritage who were familiar with the Old Testament.  The author makes a sustained case that Jesus is the fulfillment of everything the Old Testament predicted and looked forward to.

In the first five chapters (read during Lent), the author showed the supremacy of Jesus over angels and over Moses, both of great importance in the Old Testament and to the Jews.  In this season, we read about Jesus as a high priest, the supreme mediator between God and human beings.

The book of John is the last of the four gospels.  Authorship is traditionally credited to John, one of Jesus’ twelve closest followers, known as the apostles (the ‘sent ones’).  He refers to himself in the gospel as ‘the disciple Jesus loved.’  This is probably both a mark of humility—not wanting to refer to himself by name—and of the deep affection that he felt from Jesus and for Jesus.  The book is dated at 70 AD which means that it was written later in John's life, about 30 years after Jesus died and later than the other three gospels.

John's perspective on the life of Jesus is notably different from those of the other three gospels (called the ‘synoptics’—Greek for ‘seen together’—gospels).  There are some differences in the timeline of events, for example the duration of Jesus' ministry, the overlapping of his ministry with John the Baptist, and the number of trips he made to Jerusalem.  In the synoptic gospels, Jesus is betrayed by Judas, but in John, Jesus identifies himself for arrest.  Only John contains the stories of turning water to wine at a wedding and the resurrection of Lazarus.  John's gospel contains more monologue and dialogue from Jesus with fewer miracles.  The miracles he performs in John are perceived less as demonstrations of power and more as signs of things to come; in other words, the symbolic meaning of the miracles is given more prominence in John’s gospels than in the others.

The gospel of John's differences with the synoptic gospels raises several questions.  Is John mistaken on some points?  Can we reconcile the differences?  I think of it in the same way that two different writers can write a biography of the same person, ending up with two different but complementary stories.  For example, if Franklin Delano Roosevelt's wife Eleanor were to write a biography of FDR, she might focus on his family life during the World War II and the Great Depression.  His activity as the 32nd president of the United States would certainly play a role in that, but perhaps not as much as if Harry Truman (his last vice president and 33rd president) was writing the biography.  Truman would probably take a much more politically-oriented approach to FDR's life and leave out most of the details of his family.

John's close friendship with Jesus gives us a very special perspective of Jesus.  More than the other gospels, we see a Jesus that loves deeply and encourages everyone to love each other as well.  We also see that Jesus stresses the value of something called ‘eternal life’ and that it can be experienced right now.  Jesus also communicates the true nature of his miracle—they are signs of good things to come and proof of his divine nature.

As you read John, take note of the unusual way in which he dialogues with.  He speaks of being ‘born again’ in a way that is disturbing to Nicodemus.  He calls himself the ‘living bread’ and he offers a Samaritan woman ‘living water,’ both of which he says give eternal life.  Why do you think Jesus seems to be intentionally confusing in his dialogue?  What do you find appealing or troubling about Jesus' view of eternal life?

Introducing Luke

As we mentioned in the introduction to Acts, the book of Luke is part of a two-volume set with the book of Acts.  The book of Luke tells the story of Jesus’ life and teachings; Acts tells us what happens to his followers later.   The author never gives his own name, but from very early in church history the books of Luke and Actshave been ascribed to Luke, a traveling companion of Paul.  Luke was part of a small company who worked with Paul, sharing the good news and starting churches throughout the Mediterranean world.  Luke was a medical doctor by profession, and he was almost certainly the only non-Jewish author of the New Testament (and quite possibly of the entire Bible).  The audience for Lukemay have been cultured, highly-educated Greeks (Greek was the dominant culture of the eastern Roman Empire): he writes in the same formal historical style that was fashionable in Greek society at the time.  There is some evidence that Luke intended his writings for wide publication: the Gospel of Lukeand Acts are almost exactly the same length, which happens to be the length that was common in scrolls used for publication (IVP Bible Background Commentary: New Testament 187: InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL, 1993).

Luke’s gospelwas probably written after Mark’s gospel, another of the four biblical gospels, and is apparently based upon it.  Lukefollows the same basic storyline as Mark, and about 40 percent of the material is drawn directly from Mark.  But Luke also has much material that isn’t found in any of the other gospels.  Luke’s unique contributions show up particularly in his stories about Jesus’ birth and the teachings of Jesus he shares with us.  Perhaps because he is outside of Jewish society himself, he also shows a particular concern for Jesus’ interaction with people who would be outsiders in ancient Jewish society: non-Jews, women, and the poor.

As with Daniel, you can find a Daily Guide for Luke on the Leap of Faith page.