For today, One Year Bible Online links here.
Wisdom is there for us if we are willing to listen. If we seek wisdom, we will find it. However, it is too late to seek wisdom once things have gone wrong. If we wait until we are in trouble to seek wisdom, no amount of wisdom will allow us to escape our problems. Seek to act wisely before things go wrong, otherwise it will be too late.
If we wish for God to hear our prayers and listen to our cries we must be sure to pray to no one, and nothing, but Him. He takes no pleasure in wickedness and will not tolerate sin, neither should we. I was going somewhere else with this, but that caught my attention. In our world today there is a lot of talk about tolerance, and the importance of being tolerant. There is something to that. We should be tolerant of others. However, we should not be tolerant of sin.
Back to discussing how this psalm applies to our lives: God will destroy those who tell lies and detests murderers and deceivers. If we do not put such things away from us we will be unable to approach God. Fortunately, because of God’s great love we can enter His House and worship Him. And verse 8 will be my prayer:
or my enemies will conquer me.
Make your way plain for me to follow.
I struggle to see the path which God wants me to follow, but I know that He will make it plain to me if I but trust Him. God will drive away those who are too proud to admit their sins and turn to Him. But He will spread His protection over those who turn to Him for refuge. I will sing joyful songs of praise to Him.
This passage contains the Beatitudes and I am not going to write much about them today. Except to say that I like the way the NLT translates them as a change of pace from the way we usually read them, “God blesses…”. It reminds us that all blessings come from God. However, I generally prefer the traditional way of translating them, “Blessed are…” because it reminds us that being blessed for those things is built into the Universe.
What I really want to focus on are the teachings which come after the Beatitudes. Jesus uses the example of salt for how we should live several times. It really is a great metaphor for being a Christian. If we, as Christians, are not different from those around us, what good are we? But it is not enough to be different. We need to be different in a way which transforms the people around us into something better than they would be otherwise. You should observe your non-Christian acquaintances behaving in a better, more “Christian”, way the more time they spend with you. This will only happen if you are open about your faith and how it governs your behavior. In order to maintain our “saltiness” we must let our light shine. We cannot serve the Lord by hiding that we seek to serve the Lord.
Jesus goes on to tell us that the Law of Moses is not going away. God’s basic laws are here to stay and if we want to have a good life we need to follow them. Those laws exist for a reason and ignoring them because we don’t like them will end no better than ignoring the oil in our car because we don’t like it. However, we cannot obtain righteousness by making a big show about how much better we are than others. The purpose of the law is not to distinguish who is better than who. Rather the purpose of the law is to teach us how to have a good life and avoid pitfalls and unhappiness.
Finally for today, Jesus gives an example of what He means about the Law. The Law says that someone who kills someone else is subject to judgement. Jesus tells us that if we allow our anger to control our actions we are no better than a murderer. If we are in the midst of worshiping God, or anything else, and realize that someone has a gripe with us, we are to drop what we are doing and go resolve the issue.
I have heard many interpretations of the story about the Tower of Babel. Several of them made good sense to me. However today when I read it two things struck me (I find it interesting that I seem to usually break things down into two parts). The first thing is that if people work together and communicate with each other effectively, they can accomplish anything to which they set themselves. That looks like two things, but they are really two parts of the same thing. A group will not remain united if its members do not communicate with each other. Nor will its members continue to communicate with each other if they stop being united in purpose.
The second, and more important, lesson is that if we attempt to do this without putting God at the center, our communication and unity will fail. If our focus is not on serving God, no matter what other common goal we share, we will seek to advance OUR understanding of that goal and OUR personal interests, rather than the goal as shared by everyone. As that happens we will start to interpret what others say as agreeing with our understanding, rather than actually listen to what they say. In addition, we will start to word what we say so as to disguise how what we say goes against what the other person wants.