2 Kings 20:1-22:2, Acts 21:18-36, Psalms 150:1-6, Proverbs 18:9-10
Today is the 2nd day of July. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. It’s great to be here with you. I guess we are through threshold and we are squarely in the month of July. We’re in the seventh month of the year and there’s no going back. There’s only going forward. And, so, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll continue taking steps forward as we move our way through the Scriptures. And just to kind of get a lay of the land, we have a couple of days left in the book of second Kings and then we will have completed first and second Kings and before this month is out we will have read the entirety of first Chronicles and gotten our way into second Chronicles and then in the New Testament for the month of August we will complete the book Acts and then begin to move our way through the book of Romans, which will be the first of Paul’s writings that we encounter. But that’s a bit over a week from now. So, let’s settle into where we are. We’re reading from the Christian Standard Bible this week. Today, second Kings chapter 20 verse 1 through 22 verse 2.
Commentary:
Okay. So, in the book of Acts, right, we first followed along with the apostle Peter then we got to know Saul who became Paul and we’ve been traveling on these missionary journeys with the apostle Paul who was instructed to go back to Jerusalem and we went along with him as he went port to port on his way back to Jerusalem, visiting with the believers who had nurtured. And pretty much they all told him the same thing, “don’t go back to Jerusalem. It’s gonna be bad news”. Of course, Paul was aware of this through the Holy Spirit’s counsel, He kind of had an idea of what was coming and yet he…it was important that he obey God, right, not the Council of everybody else. So, he went to Jerusalem. And that is what we got to experience today, Paul arriving back in Jerusalem. And the reason that I’m recapping again is because we are touching up against serious, serious, issues in the early church, issues that are still with us today, issues that will and should challenge us, issues that people are spouting off everywhere all of the time on a continual basis. And that is fundamentally this, “who gets to be a follower, a disciple of Jesus Christ? Who gets to do that? Who gets to be in?” So, let’s explore this. As we read in the book of Acts today, when Paul arrived back to Jerusalem and the church leaders met with him they essentially said, “look, thousands of Jewish people are now following the Lord Jesus Christ. They are following The Way. They have embraced the teachings of Jesus and found a more comprehensive way of obeying the Mosaic Law and living into their faith. But they are devout about their faith and they and we are hearing things coming back here to Jerusalem that you are out all over the world saying you don’t have to observe circumcision, you don’t have to obey the Mosaic law in order to follow Jesus.” So, two very different viewpoints and we’re gonna talk about this as we continue our way all the way through the New Testament because there’s no avoiding it if you’re looking for it. And the issues are so fundamental that they affect us until today. So, on one hand you have Jesus who is Jewish, who ministered under…inside…within the Jewish context. And, so, of course, Jewish people began to follow the Rabbi. They began to follow Jesus and obey His teachings and even put their faith in Him and believe in Him, but they never ever considered the idea that they would be leaving their Jewish heritage and faith. Jesus never called them to leave their Hebrew roots. And He said with his own mouth, “I didn’t come to abolish the law I came to fulfill the law.” So, that’s where they’re coming from. At the same time, the apostles, including Peter and obviously the apostle Paul is now become the apostle to the Gentiles, they saw with their own eyes, they witnessed in their own ministry the Holy Spirit coming upon Gentiles. They saw Jesus come into the lives of households who had never heard anything about Jesus or Judaism. So, I mean, this caused dissonance for them. This is something to figure out because on the one hand the Hebrew religion, Judaism had always been very exclusive. These were God’s chosen people. Like this is a very exclusive people with a very exclusive religion. And yet then this rabbi comes, so Jesus comes, the son of God comes, but they’re all…all of those things are what people are thinking about Jesus. Like not everyone is like, “oh…of the Virgin Mary…yeah…of course…He’s the son of God”. Like, some people dismissed Jesus completely outright. Some people believed He was a wise and beyond His years, rabbi. Other people were following Him because His teachings made more sense while other people were following Him because they believed He was the son of the living God, the Messiah, but they all recognize that He was Hebrew and that was the context that He was in. So, for the Holy Spirit to begin falling upon Gentiles the world over, like, this is kind of a problem because the exclusivity is going away and everyone is universally welcome into this new thing that God is doing in the world. So, for many, especially the Jewish people, this is really hard to wrap their minds around. And, so, the way that, for the most part they could reason this through, is that a Gentile would need to convert to Judaism and then begin to follow the rabbi, Jesus, the Messiah. And we watched an entire church counsel, the first church council, like, this was the first and big issue that they needed to have a meeting about. And they took the witness and they realized, “okay, we thought we understood one way. We can see that God is doing something different that we haven’t seen before. We can’t deny what God is doing among the Gentiles, but we can’t deny who Jesus was, and the context that he taught in.” Right? So, it becomes the central question, who gets to be in? Who gets to be a follower, a disciple of Jesus? Who gets to be saved. In other words, and as we will see, this was always a disagreement. So, when we get to the writings of Paul and as we start moving through the different letters that he is sending to specific churches we will notice that the argument was an intense one because people were coming in behind Paul and telling people, “Gentile or not, you gotta get circumcised. Gentile or not you basically have to become Hebrew and follow the Hebrew customs.” This caused a tremendous amount of confusion but also seriously, seriously, made Paul angry. So, there were these conflicts about who gets to walk with Jesus. And if we’re honest and we look throughout our world today, we’re still fighting the same battle. We certainly aren’t these days, for the most part, trying to get people to convert to Judaism in order to follow Jesus. As it turned out, and we’ll see why as this story continues, the Jewish people mostly abandoned the idea of Jesus the Messiah, the son of God, who died to take away the sins of the world. It largely, as time went on, became something that was predominantly Gentile. And that is the way of the world today. But we’re still arguing about who gets to be in and sort of creating these grids in our minds about how much tolerance we can take for a person who doesn’t believe the way that we do. Like, do we say, “well…you don’t believe the same theological points on the Trinity, so you must not be a Christian” or “you don’t see the doctrine of original sin the same way that I do so you must be going to hell.” On the one hand, we could say, “well…this kind of vigorous debate has always been a part of our faith journey and the story of our faith in Jesus.” And yet it was Jesus. Like, whether you’re Jew or Gentile, it was Jesus who told us that the world would know us by our love for one another. Our disdain and disregard and dislike for one another are what’s most easy to see in the world today. I mean, troll the Internet for five minutes and you can find it. Vigorous debates among believers who seem to be convinced that it is their job to inform other believers that they will be cast into outer darkness. It’s not helping. I’ve actually had many conversations with people who love to do that kind of debate. Ad they’re like, “well…we do this kind of debate, we do this vigorous kind of debate so that the world won’t be deceived by the inaccuracies of everybody else.” And I’m like, “the world doesn’t care at all what you have to say.” They don’t want any part of this.” Sometimes I wish, as believers, we were forced to have a bumper sticker on our car. You know how you’re driving along in their delivery trucks…it’s like or our school buses…like, “how’s my driving? If there’s a problem call 1-800, you know, 123-4567.” I wish we had all have those bumper stickers, maybe on our four heads even sometimes. “How am I loving? If there’s a problem, call 1-800-123-4567.” How would that go for you on any given day? Because you will be known by your love. At least if you believe in Jesus, if you believe the words of Jesus then we will be known as disciples of Jesus by our love for one another. The early church had to deal with these kinds of issues. It’s been a part of our story and yet Jesus couldn’t have been more clear about the posture of God’s kingdom and the importance of actually loving those around us. So, I don’t know if I can plant something in your mind, but I wish that when you wake up in the morning you would think, “how am I going to be known by my love today?” And when you put your head on your pillow at night and you’re saying your night night prayers, I wish you would think was I known by my love today?
Prayer:
Jesus, obviously as we read the stories of Your life and ministry You were known by Your love and You were known because You were true, there was nothing false in You. It seems like every day we’re like juggling the false and the true, right, the shadow and the light. We can even think that we’re shining the light when we’re actually spreading the darkness. We so easily forget the fact that we will be known by our love for one another. So, come Holy Spirit and help us be known today by our love in every way we. We ask this in Your name. We ask Holy Spirit that You would come because we don’t…we can’t navigate…we can’t do this on our own. Like, we forget. We don’t have the discipline, we get too angry, we get pulled in so many directions we forget. So, the next thing You know we find ourselves condemning one another instead of loving each other and we can get ourselves twisted so backward so quickly. Holy Spirit come, that we be known by our love. Love is the currency of Your kingdom, not being right, not dogma, not doctrine, not being the sheriff at the gate of who gets to be in and who doesn’t. You are the judge. You will be known by our love. Let us love today we ask in Your precious name. Amen.
Song:
We are one in the spirit we are
one in the Lord
We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord
We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord
And we pray that our unity will one day be restored
And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love
Yeah they’ll know we are Christians by our love
We will work with each other, we will work side
by side
We will work with each other, we will work side by side
And we’ll guard each man’s dignity and save each man’s pride
And they’ll know we are Christians by our love, by our love
Yeah, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.