Bible in one year, day 35. Job 33:1-34:37; Matthew 23:1-39; Psalm 18:25-36 Blogs are back! Job 33:1-34:37… So who is this guy Elihu anyway? We learned yesterday that he was younger than Job and his three pals but more than that we don’t really know. It begins to look like Job has become a bit of a public spectacle, though. It’s not just that Job’s there with his rubbish friends but it seems as though there’s also a wee crowd there, looking on, including folks like Elihu. Can you imagine the scene? Job is in the centre mourning, having lost practically everything. He’s sitting there in his pit of ashes scraping away at his sores with bits of broken pottery. Then there’s Bildad, Eliphaz and Zophar sitting next to him and spouting forth their nonsense. Then there’s others crowding round, looking on and listening in. After all, seeing somebody else suffer has always been good entertainment – hence the huge crowds for hangings and beheadings – especially when you throw in a theological debate. So, that’s who Elihu is: an onlooker who, we’re told, has got so mad at Job’s claims of innocence and his friends’ reluctance to continue arguing with him that he’s felt he must speak up. But he’s no better than the other three. True enough, he comes out with some accurate statements… ‘For God does speak – now one way, now another.’ God does indeed speak to us in numerous different ways: through the Scriptures, in dreams, through our common sense and the list goes on and on. He’s also right when he says that God allows various things to happen to people to test them and to strengthen their faith, ‘that the light of life may shine on [them],’ he says. But, in fact, a lot of what he says to Job is really rather cheeky (to put it mildly). ‘Job says, ‘I am innocent, but God has denied me justice,’’ he says. Now Job is sitting right there so he shouldn’t be talking as if he wasn’t there. That’s just rude. But you can almost hear a mocking tone in his voice as if to say, ‘that’s what he says but he’s totally wrong, don’t you know.’ And Elihu just rehearses the same old argument: God ‘repays a man for what he has done; he brings upon him what his conduct deserves.’ And, indeed, he wants Job to be ‘tested to the utmost for answering like a wicked man.’ Elihu is a weird figure. He’s not one of the three friends – Job should be thankful for that. And he disappears from the book as suddenly as he first showed up. My gut reaction to him, if he wants Job to speak up and answer him (33:5), is that he’d better shut up soon. That’s 3 chapters he’s been yakking on for and we’ve still got three more of his ‘words’ before he’s finished. Then God will speak! Matthew 23:1-39… The seven woes, eh! These are powerful and uncompromising words. And we can learn a lot about how we behave and act by reading through them. But, before we do that, just pause to notice that we are to have one Master, one Father and one Teacher: God. That’s important. Don’t allow other voices to guide you, raise you or teach you. Let it be only God that governs your life. The first woe is about making sure that nothing about us or the way we do things stops people from becoming Christians; from entering the Kingdom of Heaven. We must make sure that we are so alert to the needs of others. And we must be willing to do everything we possibly can to ensure that many people can enter the Kingdom of Heaven and begin a relationship with God. When somebody does become a Christian we must be sure that they become more like Jesus, not more like us. We’re often tempted to look down on others, thinking that they don’t fit into church or youth group because they’re so ‘different.’ But, as I say, they’ve to be like Jesus, not like us, whether they fit our mould or not. That’s woe number two. Woe number three is about being careful with sacred stuff. Sacred stuff is powerful stuff and so we ought to be careful what we make our promises on. Gold, silver, temple, altar or God’s name itself are all dangerous things to invoke as you swear something. If you make that promise you’d better be sure to keep it fully. And we’d better be sure we focus on the really important stuff. That’s woe number four. The Pharisees and teachers of the law were so obsessed with following rules and regulations that they neglected the important stuff which is harder to quantify and record in rule books. Those things are ‘justice, mercy and faithfulness.’ Having some rules and guidelines is important – I think it is important to give a tenth of your income to God, as the Bible says you should – but I don’t think that we should get so hung up on that that we forget about people and what they really need. Or about God, and that he demands our whole life, not just our legal obligations. Woe five teaches us to make sure our lives are in order. It’s about making sure we’re OK on the inside instead of just making sure we have a good appearance. Jesus, actually, doesn’t care about what jeans we wear or if we do our hair differently when we come to church. But he does care, deeply, about the state of our hearts and whether we’re living clean lives. And woe six is similar. But this one’s really about keeping our faith alive. We can look and sound like Christians and spend all amounts of hours making sure we’ve followed this rule and read that book and listened to these sermons. But if we forget that the whole point is to fall deeper in love with Jesus then it’s like we’re just managing out gravesite whilst being full of dead bones. And woe seven… this one’s about recognising God’s messengers and being honest with ourselves. The Pharisees didn’t recognise who John the Baptist had been or who Jesus was and is. But they did have the cheek to say that, if they’d been alive with their ancestors, they’d never have stoned the prophets. As if! Their ancestors stoned the prophets and, even now, they can’t see that Jesus is the Son of God. They need a reality check. There’s a lot of good wisdom in there to think through. Psalm 18:25-36… I’ve used this portion of Psalm 18 at youth weekend away morning leaders’ meetings before. It’s fair to say that everyone’s exceedingly tired at these meetings and have been doubting whether they’d be able to do anything worthwhile in the day ahead. This Psalm, actually, has reminded us that on our own we can’t do anything worthwhile or significant in terms of the Kingdom. With God, though, we can do amazing things. A quick glance at the Psalm shows all the things we can do when we’re empowered by God.
Posted on: Sat, 05 Oct 2013 22:38:33 +0000
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