For today, One Year Bible Online links here.

    You cannot be devious and please God. God is pleased by those who are honest and act with integrity. Those who put on a show of righteousness in order to disguise their corruption will not find favor with God. God will reward those whose integrity and righteousness goes all the way to the depths of their heart.

    I will meditate on this psalm today. I will seek God and I will praise His name for as long as He gives me life. This psalm is a great meditation for focusing on God. I encourage you to spend a few minutes reading and re-reading this psalm. As you do so, make it your prayer.

    The ways in which Jesus was tempted in the wilderness represent three ways in which we can be tempted to have our ministry derailed from serving God. The first, turning stones into bread, is the temptation to make our focus on meeting the physical needs of those to whom we minister: feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, etc. These are good things and they are things we should be doing. However, if we do that to the exclusion of teaching people to repent of their sins and turn to God, we are not fulfilling God’s will for us.
    The second temptation is to seek political power in order to fix the institutional ills of our society. In this one the danger is obvious. In order to gain political power, we need to compromise with those who are not seeking to do God’s will. Or, as the temptation puts it, we must worship the devil. In some ways the very idea of using political power to reshape the world is a repudiation of God. God is not just looking for people to stop doing wrong. He is calling us to do right. Political power is the power to coerce others. People can only be coerced to not do wrong. It is not possible to make a rule book (or a set of laws) which spell out the right thing to do in every situation. It is possible to make laws which list things which are always wrong, but it is not possible to write a rule book which covers what is the right thing to do in every situation. Ultimately, we need to call people to worship God and to seek to do His will.
    Finally, the third temptation is the temptation to completely avoid the first two things and focus exclusively on calling people to spiritual healing. It is not enough to preach the Gospel when people are hungry and/or oppressed. As I read this I am reminded of a ministry I have worked with in the past. The ministry in question works with the poorest of the poor in a Honduras. The leader of the organization was touched by the starving children there many years ago. She sought to alleviate that problem. She immediately saw that the problem could not be solved by just giving the people food. They needed to learn to provide for themselves and their children. They needed the transformative power of the Gospel. Almost immediately she also realized that it was not enough for the people to change their own behaviors, the society in which they lived trapped them in their poverty. The laws and government needed to change as well. As a result, she set up an organization which worked with all three phases. It worked to provide for the physical needs of the people. It preached the Gospel to the people in need. And it pressured the government to change the laws that kept the people trapped in their poverty. As I said, I am oversimplifying what went on here, but the point is that if we are to serve God we must address all three aspects of human life.

    I realized something as I read this, there is a difference between what is talked about here when it discusses vows and what we normally understand about what Jesus was talking about when He told us not to take any vows. I know that, in my case at least, we tend to think of “Swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” when we think of vows and oaths in the context of what Jesus said.
    In this passage, a vow is about promising to take a specific action, no matter what the costs or consequences. This is in contrast to in the ordinary course of things where we say, “I am going to do that,” meaning “I plan to do that, unless something I did not factor on intervenes.” I am not saying that Jesus was not referring to this sort of oath when He said what He said, merely that that is not normally what we think of when we read that passage.

    I am using One Year Bible Online for my daily Bible study. For today, One Year Bible Online links here. I have found that by writing this daily blog of what I see when I read these scriptures, I get more out of them. I hope that by posting these ruminations others may get some benefit as well. In order to make that possible I read the passages and write my thoughts a day, or more. in advance. If you have any thoughts or comments regarding these verses or what I have written about them, please post them.

    God detests those who wallow in perversity, whether it be sexual or otherwise, no matter how much they claim to love Him. On the other hand, God loves those who serve Him with integrity.

    I want to make this psalm my own. This psalm gives great advice for seeing our way through this life. I will praise God as long as I live. I desire Him with all of my being. Let me not become distracted by the pleasures this life brings. When I lie awake at night, I will bend my thoughts to God. I will meditate on His will through the night. I will cling to God because it is only by His strong arm that I can make it through this life.

    There are no shortcuts to serving God. We do not spread the Gospel by feeding the poor. We do not advance God’s will in this world by compromising/working with those who oppose the Gospel. We do not perform wondrous acts in order to bring attention to ourselves. I am not sure where I am going with this because one can take this lesson too far. Feeding the poor is something we should do in service to God. We should be willing to work with any who will work towards advancing God’s will (“Anyone who is not against us is for us.”). God has given us the power to perform wonders in order to spread His Word. However, this passage reminds us that all of these can be temptations. We can become caught up with feeding the physical hunger of the poor and forget to feed their spiritual hunger. We can get caught up in our attempts to make the world a better place and start to worship the powers of this world. We can allow the attention that comes to us when we perform God’s wonders to go to our heads and forget to turn that attention away from ourselves towards God. Let us never forget that our first mission in this life is to introduce those around us to Jesus.

    When we last saw Balaam he was blessing the people of Israel even though his employer desired him to curse them. He refused to say anything other than what God commanded him to say. Yet now, when God sends the Israelites to extract vengeance against the Midianites for leading the Israelite men into worshiping false gods and other sins, we find Balaam still among the Midianites. We discover that it was Balaam who had advised the Midianites to have their women seduce Israelite men into worshiping the Midianite idols. How did Balaam go from being a man who would only say what God commanded him to say to a man who advised Israel’s enemies in ways to defeat them? This passage does not tell us, but we have hints from the earlier passage. He was tempted by the wealth offered him. When he could not gain that wealth by cursing the Israelites outright, he came up with a plan to get it by other means.