New Post: Joshua 1-3; Psalm 65; Luke 11

Joshua 1-3  This book which, along with the 5 books of the Torah (the Pentateuch), is sometimes referred to as comprising the Hexateuch, continues the narrative of the conquest and settling of the land that God promised to Israel.  It begins in a remarkably direct way: God tells Joshua, "Moses has died. Now you take the Israelites the rest of the way."  They are to prepare for what is a military invasion.

And once again, my questions about violence that is apparently done in the name of the LORD come bubbling to the surface.  How is this right???

Chapter 2 tells the story of Rahab, who shelters the Israelite spies.
Chapter 3 tells of the waters of the Jordan (as they cross over into the Land of Promise) standing up like the waters of the sea had when the Israelites left Egypt.

Psalm 65 Another of my favorites, especially on a spring morning like this one.  It's a song of praise to God, that the whole creation joins in singing.
"You visit the earth and water it
you greatly enrich it;
the river of God is full of water;
you provide the people with grain,
for so you have prepared it.
You water its furrows abundantly,
settling its ridges, softening it with showers
 and blessing its growth.
You crown the year with your bounty...

This is all about the world that is, in the words of the wonderful poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins, "charged with the grandeur of God":

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Luke 11  If there is any sort of narrative logic to this chapter, it is hard to detect.  It is chapters like this that make it easy for us to break the Gospels into little pericopes (passages that seem to hang together with some internal consistency) and look at them one at a time, but not feel like one is moving forward toward any sort of narrative goal.

The disciples asked Jesus how to pray after they watched him make time and space for prayer.   Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer is a little different from Matthew's, but in essence the same.  The Luke version uses the Greek word for "sins" and the Matthew version "trespasses" or "debts" for a concept that Jesus most likely taught them about in Aramaic.  And we, of course, read in English translations.  A sin against God, a trespass into territory that is not ours, debts we owe because we have taken and not paid or compensated the one from whom we took...  We need forgiveness.  And the way we forgive is tied up with the way we receive forgiveness.    The Luke version ends, "Do not bring us to the time of trial" (11:4).

Then, since they're talking about prayer anyhow, Jesus talks about perseverance when it comes to prayer, employing an example of somebody going to borrow bread from a neighbor in the middle of the night to feed a guest who has just arrived.  Jesus admits that such behavior would stretch a friendship; but that perseverance pays off in the end.  Interesting that it is perseverance for the sake of being able to help meet the needs of somebody else, in this case a guest.

Then there are two little sections on Jesus and how he relates to the spiritual powers that oppose him: "Now if I cast out the demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your exorcists cast them out?" he asks (11:19).  And his words in vss. 24-26 so accurately reflect our own experience of making fundamental changes in our own lives.  We get things cleaned up, the old devil kicked out, and then seven more come.  

Note also in v. 32 another oblique reference to the crucifixion and resurrection...

Then Luke gives us material that is like the 'light of the world' analogies in Matthew's Sermon on the Mount.  And he has another section of "woes" --this time it's woe to the lawyers and Pharisees! for their hypocrisy.