I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on John 19-21

When the leading priests declared that they have no king but Caesar they were making a blasphemous statement.  They intended it as a political statement to force Pilate’s hand, but it was also a repudiation of God.  By making this statement, they were declaring that their highest allegiance was to Caesar when it should have been to God.  This should be a warning to us.  We can get so caught up in promoting our political ideas that we place government above God.

I love thinking about what was happening when Peter went fishing again after Jesus’ resurrection.  Peter did not know what else to do, so he went fishing.  The other Apostles joined him because they did not know what else to do either.  All of them had been spending all of their time for the last three years following Jesus around.  Now He had died and while He had risen from the dead and appeared to them, He wasn’t around all of the time.  So, Peter went back to what he knew, fishing.  I was going to focus on the fact that Jesus got Peter to declare that he loved Him once for each of the times Peter had denied Him, but I realized there is another point to this story.

Peter went back to fishing because, now that his days of being a disciple of a famous rabbi were over, he needed to support himself.  However, he spent all night fishing and caught nothing.  Jesus showed up as he was giving up and told him to throw the nets back into the water.  They did as He said, even though they were too close to shore to reasonably expect to catch anything and as a result they caught an extraordinarily large haul.  Then Jesus tells Peter that he needs to focus on building up those who chose to follow Jesus going forward.  God would take care of his needs.