For today, One Year Bible Online links here.
These three proverbs all fit together in a way that many people fail to understand. Society becomes truly oppressive when the poor join with the rich in oppressing their fellows in poverty. The wicked thrive and rise to the top in a society where those who are favored follow a different set of rules from everyone else. The only way to resist the wicked is by obeying the laws that apply to everyone else, even when you can get away with not doing so. Those who are steeped in evil believe that justice is just an excuse used by those in power to get their own way. Only those who seek the Lord truly understand the meaning of justice.
When God opens the gate where the righteous enter, will we go in? Or we be like the builders and reject the cornerstone because we think we know better than the Architect? No matter how intelligent and knowledgeable we think we are, let us recognize that God, as Creator of the Universe, has a better understanding of how we should live than we are capable of. God has made this day for us, let us rejoice in it and be glad. God is my God and I will praise Him.
At first reading this passage seems to support those who preach “prosperity gospel”. James says that the source of all conflict is because we want things and do not have them. As a result we scheme and kill to get those things we desire. He goes on to tell us that the reason we do not have what we desire is because we do not ask God for what we desire. This sounds like standard “prosperity gospel” (which is not real Gospel at all).
However, James does not stop there. He goes on to tell us that even when we do ask, we do not receive because we ask with the wrong motives. When we ask God for things in order to spend them on our own pleasures, God will not give us what we ask for. When we desire things in order to use them for our own pleasure, we are seeking to befriend the world. If we are friends of this world, we are enemies of God.
So, rather than seeking things to use for our own pleasure we should humble ourselves before God. Part of doing this is seeking to spend what God has given us in serving Him. We need to faithfully desire to please God rather than ourselves. The next sentence seems to be a change of theme, but I think I see how it fits in with what went before.
James said that we have conflict when we seek that which we do not have in order to spend it on our own desires. Now he tells us that the way to deal with temptation and sin is to resist the devil. If we resist temptation and those who encourage us to fall into it, they will flee from us. He is not really saying that those who encourage us to sin will flee from us when we resist temptation, although many of them will do so (with flee perhaps not being the word that would first come to mind). He says that if we resist the devil, he will flee from us. By which I take him to mean that if we resist the temptation to sin, we will find that the opportunity to succumb to that temptation will pass…and the more we resist the temptation, the fewer opportunities we will have to succumb to it in the future.
There is one final point James makes in this passage. If we know what we ought to do and do not do it, it is just as much a sin as doing what we know we ought not do. It is not enough to not do wrong. In addition, we must do what is right.
Ezekiel goes into great detail describing what the Temple in the restored Jerusalem will look like and its dimensions. I have read this passage many times, but it carries no special meaning for me. I have heard sermons preached on this passage and I admire preachers and teachers who see deep meaning in what Ezekiel describes here. However, it is not something that I see when I read this (although occasionally I will see what someone else sees when they talk about this passage).