Numbers 26:52-28:15, Luke 3:1-22, Psalms 61:1-8, Proverbs 11:16-17
Today is the 18th day of March. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It is great to be here with you as we take a step forward into the week and launch into our work week this week. And we’re reading from the God’s Word Translation. And, so, we’ll pick up where we left off. That’ll take us back into the book of Numbers and then in the gospel of Luke when we get to the New Testament, Jesus…well…Jesus has just stayed in Jerusalem when his family left they and they had to go back and search for him and we’ll pick up the story when we get there, but first, Numbers chapter 26 verse 52 through 28 verse 15 today.
Commentary:
Okay. So, in the gospel of Luke today we got a pretty good glimpse at the ministry of John the Baptist and the kinds of things that he was saying, and we can see that the kinds of things that he was saying certainly would bring hope and encouragement to those who were downtrodden and who were in a situation that was kind of like a no-win situation. So, you know, for Hebrew people they’re in a land that was their former ancestral homeland but the land now is a part of the Roman Empire, is a part of the province of Syria. And, so, there are Romans and Roman authorities, right, the police as it were, in the region because it’s part of the Roman Empire. But truth be told, Romans didn’t like being in Syria. Like it’s the farthest east outpost of the Empire, pretty far away from ground zero, which would’ve been Rome itself. So, their kind of in this backwater and they got these people who have these strange beliefs about their former ancestral homeland. And, so, they don’t get along, they don’t mix. These people who are known as Hebrews they like stay to themselves a lot, they don’t associate with anyone, they’re very exclusive. So, this isn’t a particularly awesome time for anybody in the region. And, truth be told, people are manipulating and getting away with whatever they can possibly get away with, right, doing whatever they possibly can and to get a leg up. And, so, John comes to the Jordan River inviting everybody who hears him to repent and turn to God. And they’re listening them and saying, “what we do” and he begins to speak a message of turning life outward. So, some people are like, “what are we supposed to do? Like, if condemned, like how do we repent? Functionally, what is this look like?” And John’s like, “whoever has two shirts should share with the person that doesn’t have any. Whoever has food shared it too.” And the tax collectors are like, “what we supposed to do?” And he’s like, “don’t extort, right? Don’t take money that’s not yours. Collect what you are ordered to collect by the government and don’t pad it and collect for yourself”. Right? So, the first people he’s talking to would be Hebrew people, the second people he’s talking to would be Hebrew people who are working for the Roman government, right, and hated, despised by the Hebrew people because they’re Hebrew, but they’re perceived as traitors. And then some soldiers talk to him, right? The Romans themselves are saying, “what are we supposed to do?” And he tells them, “just be satisfied with what you have. Like, the governments paying you to the keep peace. Be satisfied with that pay and stop like suppressing, threatening, blackmailing people to pad your own pockets, right? So, we see that John was speaking to his own fellow Hebrews. He was speaking to people who were Hebrew but who were kind of half in with the Romans, and then he was also speaking to the Gentiles, the Roman soldiers. So, his message was for anyone would listen as Jesus’s was, for anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see. Now, a couple days ago we talked about how it was that John came on the radar. You know, he wasn’t just somebody who came out of the desert looking foolish or looking crazy and starting shouting messages and people started flooding out into the desert to see him. There was prophetic words over John’s life spoken by his father Zechariah who was a priest of God who had seen an angel in the temple of God in Jerusalem foretelling this. This would have been some of what John grew up around. So, when he does start to say things publicly people then remember this is that kid, this is that baby. He grew up. This is what he has to say. There were prophetic utterances about him. We should listen to him and they do, and they begin to repent, and revival is happening. It’s just the religious leaders are not fully on board, they’re not like completely condoning what John is doing. As the story goes, was John’s mission was to pave the way, right, to announce the coming, the arrival of the Messiah, of the Savior who is Jesus. Jesus is also alive at this time. So, when Jesus comes in the Jordan River, was it John’s endorsement, was it John saying, you know, you shouldn’t…I shouldn’t be baptizing You, You should be baptizing me. Was it this that gave Jesus the momentum? Was it the Father’s voice of approval over Jesus that gave Him the momentum? We could say it was all of these things, but Jesus had also shown up on the radar previously, right? So, yesterday, we read the story of Jesus being 12 years old and going to Jerusalem for Passover as was the annual custom of his family. So, Jesus had been to Jerusalem many times, 90 miles uphill to Jerusalem and then 90 miles back to Nazareth. And it’s a famous story, right? We know the story. His parents leave. And you can think like, “how could his parents leave? Like, how did they leave without knowing where Jesus was?” But that’s just it. It would’ve been a whole caravan coming out of Galilee, whole families, friends, entire community traveling together. And, so, they, you know, I don’t know, they probably saw Jesus that morning or whatever and then they’re heading out. And Jesus is gonna make one more stop at the temple and he stays. So, Mary and Joseph get a whole day away before they realize Jesus is missing. I’m a parent and a lot of you are parents and so you put yourself in this position where you have assumed your kid is with his friends or with his cousins or whatever and you get a day’s journey away from where you were only…like what if you went to Disneyland and you got a day away from Disneyland and realized your kid was still at Disneyland. That would just be insane. So, you can only imagine Mary and Joseph walking a day’s journey, like taking another day just to get back. So, there two days removed from Jesus and then they gotta a search in one of the biggest metropolises in the world, a hub where people from all over the world are coming and going and they’re searching all over this big city for three days. So, they’re five days removed before they ever see their son. Oh my gosh! Yeah. So, they find him in the temple and he’s been there asking questions and having conversation with the most elite of the religious leaders in all of Judaism among all of the Hebrew people, right? So, there may be Pharisees all over the country but we’re talking about these of the scholars who work in the temple in Jerusalem, the best of the best, cream of the crop. This is where Jesus is hanging out and he’s asking questions and they’re pouring into his life story and the traditions and He’s speaking back to them and they are amazed by Him, right? So, that’s not like just a passing thing. Jesus is among the influencers of the Jewish faith and He’s speaking to them and they are amazed by Him. So, when he does go back to Galilee He’s not going back to obscurity. They know who he is now. They might even have considered Him at that point to be someone to watch, right, a rising star, a potentially powerful rabbi of some sort in the making. So, after Jesus is baptized and after His time in the wilderness and He goes back to Galilee and does begin his ministry what we see in the Gospels is that people are not antagonistic to Him. They may have questions for Him, but they are not antagonistic toward Him at first. And He begins to gain some momentum to the point of that the Bible tells us, even the scribes and Pharisees would come from Jerusalem to hear Him, right? So they’re making a long journey to hear this man because He had shown up on the radar when He was a little kid and now He’s all grown up and now He has something to say. The only time things went sideways, and they went sideways bad enough to get Jesus killed, is when he began to critique the religion centered around Him, when He began to critique the behavior and confront the religious leaders, when He began to essentially say we’ve lost the plot of the story, the spirit of the law is gone, we only have the letter of the law, that we are using these rules and regulations to enslave people. And they were never meant to be a cage, they were meant to be the parameters that would lead to freedom, right? We turn the page back into the Old Testament and that’s where we find ourselves right now, the law is being given so that the people have a context for how to live in a land that they have been promised, right? God didn’t set his people free from slavery only to re-enslave them. He gave them the rules and regulations and their context that would lead them to freedom and dramatic advancement forward, right? So, like, even in today’s reading in the Old Testament we have a story of three daughters who had lost their father and who’s his name was about to be left off or disappear from history, the history of his family. And, so, they go before Moses and we look at this society as a patriarchal society and we bristle in this particular day in age and political climate, but that is how the world was. But here are these daughters saying should our father’s name disappear? What does Moses Do? He goes to God. What does God say? “Give them the land among their brethren” and then that gets written into the law, right? If a father has no son to pass his inheritance down to, and in this case, a father passing that authority and those resources down to his firstborn son would be him saying, “you are now responsible for this entire family.” So, yeah, you may have control over things, but you are responsible for every life in this family.” But in this case God wrpote it into the law, “if there is no son to take over the family leadership and watch out for the lives of the rest of the family, then the land passes to the daughters.” At this time in world history, that is a huge step forward. We’re talking thousands and thousands of years ago God wrote it into the law that women could own property. Dude, in our country…in the country I live in, the United States, women couldn’t even vote. So, lest we think we are so advanced, and the Bible is so antiquated, yeah, I mean we gotta read through some cultural stuff here, but the Bible is revealing to us that God was moving a culture that He was building in the wilderness dramatically forward, huge steps in human interaction and governance were moving dramatically forward. So, God didn’t give the law to enslave people who had just walked out of slavery but Jesus critique was that the religious leaders had used the law to enslave the people and He had to come that they might have life and have it more abundantly, that he could set the captives free. That would just ultimately require a complete retooling of the entire system and they fought against Jesus. But now we have a little bit of context for what is going on as we continue to move forward in the gospel. And hopefully this context will give us some background for some of these well-worn stories that we’re very familiar with. Sometimes having context changes the entire dynamic.
Prayer:
Jesus, we thank you, thank you for the opportunity to talk about what was going on when you chose to come to earth and change the entire paradigm and we thank you for the long view that we can go all the way back thousands of years even before that and see how you were at work. This tells us clearly that you are still at work and we are still telling the story of God with us and we haven’t irreplaceable role to play in that story today. So, come Holy Spirit, lead us into all truth. This is your promise. Lead us on the narrow path that leads to life. This is our desire. Come Holy Spirit we pray. In Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.
Announcements:
dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, its where you find out what’s going on around here. So, be sure to stay connected.
One of the things that are coming up pretty quickly here is the More Gathering for women. That’s April 11th through the 14th and that will be where we’ve always done it, but this will be the last time we’ll be doing it there, up on Sharp Top mountain. Those are in the northern Appalachia…well…they’re actually in the southern Appalachian Mountains, but they live in in the mountains of North Georgia. That’s about an hour out of Atlanta. So, you can get all the details for that. If you’re a woman and more…more…if you’re just in your heart you feel like there’s got to be more than this, then this is for you and you can get all of the details at moregathering.com or you can go to dailyaudiobible.com and click the Initiatives section and you’ll get the details there.
And speaking of the initiatives section, while you’re there you will also see Israel 2020. And if you are interested in going back to the land of the Bible…I know we just came back from their…it was a month ago yesterday that we left. So, we’ve been back a while…couple weeks anyway, but if you are interested in going in 2020, you can get all the details at dailyaudiobible.com in the Initiatives section.
If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There is a link and it just lives on the homepage. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.
And, as always if you have a prayer request or comment, there are a number of numbers you can use. If you are in the Americas, 877-942-4253 is the number to dial. If you are in the UK or Europe 44-20-3608-8078 is the number to call. If you are in Australia 61-3-8820-5459 is the number to dial.
And that’s it for today. I’m Brian I love you and I’ll be waiting for you here tomorrow.