Genesis 46:1-47:31, Matthew 15:1-28, Psalms 19:1-14, Proverbs 4:14-19
Today is the 23rd day of January. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian and it’s great to be here with you today as we continue forward and take the next step in our adventure that we have embarked on as a community to take one step a day every day for a whole year and read the entire Bible. So, we’re reading from the English Standard Version this week and we are rounding the corner and, you know, in a few days we’ll finish the first book of the Bible, which is the book of Genesis. We’re not quite there, we have a few days to go, but we are also rounding the corner on this Joseph story that we’ve been tracking for a while and what a drama it is so. SO, Joseph, you know, Jacob, Joseph’s father has now discovered that Joseph, in fact, isn’t dead and all the grief that he’s had for all of those years mourning him may turn into joy. And, so, we’ll pick the story up. Genesis chapter 46 and 47 today and we’re reading from the English Standard Version. Sid I already say that? I don’t know. We’re reading from the English Standard Version this week.
Commentary:
Okay. So, we’re beginning to see the antagonism between Jesus and the religious establishment and we kind of know where this story goes. The religious establishment is gonna do everything they can to ill Jesus in the end and in the end they’ll succeed. So, in today’s reading, the religious establishment is questioning why Jesus does the things that He does and why He does them the way that Ge does them because He is breaking the religious traditions. And Jesus pushes back by simply exposing the fact that they also break their own religious traditions. What he’s trying to do is help them understand their religious traditions and what they have made of the law is not what it was intended to be. And, of course, this calls into question all kinds of things, you know, what the religion is about, how God will feel about these changes, how to control the population and keep them devout. Like, all kinds of things begin to come up and it’s antagonizing because what Jesus is talking about is deconstruction. Ironically, the kind of antagonism that Jesus faced with the Pharisees early in his ministry, you have to wonder if He wouldn’t be in just as much trouble if He came here today speaking the same message to Christians. I know that sounds odd but at the end of Jesus confrontation today He said it all, “for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God. You hypocrites. Well did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said this, this people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” Okay, Jesus spoke this 2000 years ago when He was speaking of a prophecy that was like 700 years older than that. So, this has been going on a long time and it’s still going on. And I’m a product of the church, right? I grew up in the church, the son of a pastor. I have been in ministry a long time. Like, if there’s something that I do understand I think it's…it’s the ways of the church and it’s been an interesting journey for me over the course of 14 years reading the Bible every day. And looking at stuff that Jesus is saying and then going back in the context of why they’re mad at him and realizing that we’re repeating the same cycle in so many ways, right? So, for example, what is the message of the gospel? If like…if we were…if we were to articulate what the message of the church and the gospel of Jesus Christ is, we would say, “it doesn’t matter where you’ve been, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, it doesn’t matter what has brought you to this point, if you will believe and accept Jesus as your Savior, your sins, all of them, no matter what they are, no matter what they have ever been, they will be washed away and you will be clean and God’s mercy will overshadow you and you will be born into the family of God and become a part of the body of Christ, brothers and sisters all over the world.” Right? So, that’s what we would say and that is what we believe. That is absolutely the truth. Ironically, that grace, that hovers over you in the pitch, right, to accept Jesus, that seems to go away after you do because after you do you better never sin again, or your brothers and sisters will crucify you. This is the behavior Jesus is pressing in on here. The religious establishment had gotten about the business of trying to corral the people into a fundamentally uniform process of obeying the law, and yet the spirit of the law had been lost. And, so, we have wrote traditions to follow with the whole thing being about modifying behavior as opposed to experiencing union and intimacy with God. And if you do a 360 around you we see this is still going on. We just have Christian traditions instead of Jewish Hebrew traditions to enforce. And this so quickly turns to judgment and, O my gosh, and you can just go out on social media and find the wars. And so often they boil down to what somebody did say or what somebody didn’t say or what opportunity somebody missed when they should have said this or how they might be believing something that we don’t believe and that that can’t be right. And, so, we’ve absolutely become Pharisees thinking that we are protecting God and that we are holding onto the traditions and enforcing what God would have us do in protecting the true doctrine. But the bottom line is the true doctrine, like, the true religion can be destroyed over time when mankind tries to interpret and enforce everyone else about it. So, Jesus is pressing into exactly this with the Pharisees today, but all we have to do is just harken back to what he’s been saying all along. “judge not lest you be judged. The way that you judge others is the way you are going to be judged. Forgive and you will be forgiven. If you do not forgive, you will not be forgiven.” These are all things Jesus has been laying out all long since we started the journey. So, we have to consider our own posture of heart in the way that it is that we look at our fellow brothers and sisters all around us, especially, especially our brothers and sisters who do not see things the same way that we do. We can find ourselves being very, very pharisaical and then we have to listen to Jesus words, “for the sake of your tradition you have made void the word of God.” So, may we not be people who will honor the Lord with our lips, but our hearts are far from Him, because that is vain worship which means not doing anything and may we be very careful not to teach as doctrines the commandments of men.
Prayer:
Jesus, we come to You, these are Your words that we are speaking about, so we come to You. You said these things and they do prickle us, they do make us go, “wait, what are we talking about here”, because on some level we don’t want to be the Pharisees but on the other side of it we want to do right. And, left to our own devices, this will lead us to judging others, this will lead us to unforgiveness, this will lead us into all kinds of things that make our religion nothing more than a tradition when what You are inviting us into is a personal, dynamic, always on, never off, life-giving relationship with You, and that is what we seek. But we do have the tendency to try to box that up and make it dogma and tradition as opposed to life-giving relationship. So, we need You. So. We’re coming to You Jesus. What are You bringing up? What are You speaking to us in this regard? Come Holy Spirit we pray. In Jesus’ name we ask. Amen.
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