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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 4-5.

    Luke’s account of the temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness demonstrate the temptations faced by those who seek to change the world. The first temptation is to bribe people to do as you say by providing for their physical needs. The second temptation is to acquire political power and force people to do as you say. The third temptation is to overawe people and get them to do as you say without thinking. I am not sure I have summed up the temptations correctly, but I am convinced that they represent the different wrong ways which people use when they try to fix what is wrong with the world. Jesus knew that the only way to fix the world was to convince people to do the right thing and that each person had to figure out what the right thing was for themselves. There is no one-size-fits-most set of rules which can be imposed on everyone in order to fix the world. People need to desire to do the right thing.

    I have never quite understood the dynamics of what took place when Jesus preached in the synagogue in Nazareth. As best I can figure it out, the people were initially skeptical of Jesus because He was “one of them”, what made Him an authority to teach them? Jesus responded to this by pointing out that being Jewish did not give them an exclusive claim on God. Sometimes God chooses to perform His miracles for those outside of the “chosen” rather than among them. Sometimes God’s word is more positively received by the “sinners” than by the “saved”.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 2-3.

    Luke chapter 2:1-20 was the passage my Dad read every Christmas Eve when we celebrated Christmas as a family (we celebrated our family Christmas on Christmas Eve because my Dad’s family got together on Christmas Day for a family dinner). The first thing which struck me today was Luke’s attention to detail. Luke’s account contains all of the things which the urban legends websites tell you are missing from urban legends and myths. Luke tells us that Jesus was born during a census taken when Augustus was Emperor and Quirinius was governor of Syria (the word which Luke uses for governor is ambiguous and does not refer to a specific Roman title, merely to the most powerful political figure in a region). I would also note that Luke’s source for most of chapter two must have been Jesus’ mother, Mary. I have two reasons for believing Mary to be Luke’s source. First, these strike me as the types of stories, with the types of details, that a mother would remember. Second, who else that was present would be likely to both remember the incident and still be alive 50 or so years later?

    The message of John the Baptist was very similar to what James wrote in his letter many years later. It really comes down to this, if you truly love God your actions will reflect it. In some ways. what John says here reflects what Jesus said when He told His disciples that it is not food which defiles us. Our words and actions come from our deepest being and reflect what we truly believe. You can say that you believe whatever you want, but people can tell from what you do if you truly believe it. There is one further point I want to make that comes from Jesus’ comment about what defiles us. Over time, your actions will change your beliefs. Every time you take an action which is inconsistent with what you say you believe, the less you will believe it. On the other hand, every time you take an action which is consistent with a particular belief the more you will believe it. The latter works even if you thought you did not believe it in the first place.