Ruth 1-2; Psalm 89; 1 Timothy 5

May 15: Your life is being watched: your testimony matters. Trust God and lean not on your own understanding. Wait for Him and see how it pans out.

Ruth 1-2: Does Naomi come to repent of her unjust testimony about the Lord? (Ruth 1:20) It seems so, and hopefully her daughter-in-law’s story becomes better known than her bitter complaint. She had abandoned the house of bread for the pagan nation in a time of crisis, but God had nevertheless shown kindness to her, to Ruth, and to her dead husband and son. 

Psalm 89:1-29: Who is the real King of Israel? It is the LORD (Psalm 89:18). David is HIs servant, who will cry to God as his Father, the Rock of his Yeshua, and God will make him His firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth. His Seed will endure forever. We can compare this passage to Galatians 3:16, as in the Abrahamic Covenant as well as this promise, God has Christ in mind. It's important that the words of this Psalm are passed along accurately or the prediction is lost, and the clear references to Christ are muddied.

1 Timothy 5: Paul is instructing Timothy in generalities, but circumspect ones. Are the instructions about younger widows contradictory? If you put them on the church’s support, they’ll just start feeling the impulses of sexual desire, marry and be indolent, spreading gossip. So my advice is that the younger widows get married. If we put the emphasis on marriage as being the offense, yes, that would be contradictory. But he’s not saying that a widow who has remarried has “turned aside after satan.” He’s saying that the other things represent that. I also think the KJV translation of “having damnation because they have cast off their first faith” tends to lead us to consider this in the ultimate sense when I think the faith/“pistis” here has to do with their contractual commitment to the church in receiving the financial support, thus “damnation” is likely earthly judgment, and not the eschatological damnation of hell.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We have all contracted the virus....

Last week and this weekend, I spent precious development time trying to rid myself of unwanted software on my coumputer called " Virtumonde ." Believe it or not, I'm pretty new to viruses and that kind of thing, coming from a background of developing on the Macintosh platform and using the Windows platforms to deliver product on. Well, this was a nasty wake up call to what Windows users have to deal with all the time. Virtumonde is called "Adware" and it's something that has sneaked on to your computer either by being installed along with some kind of trial software, or getting past your computer's defenses on the network. Its job is to watch what you do at all times with your computer, then occasionally pop up advertisements. In my case, most of the time, these advertisements were for anti-virus software. But they kept popping up an installation window for the software and beginning the installation even when I clicked, "no" for "do you w
Read more

2023—Week21: Ezra01-Nehemiah11; John19-Acts04

Ezra-Nehemiah 11 : In the Jewish Canon, Ezra and Nehemiah are one book, and, although the division in ours makes sense, it’s clear that they cover the same basic period. They form one answer to the question at the end of 2 Chronicles’ hanging question, “Therefore, who among the LORD's people trusts in his God? Whoever among this group wishes to do so may travel to Jerusalem.” (2 Chronicles 36:23, ISV) Yet despite their trust, the people are greatly weakened until the ministries of Ezra and Nehemiah (and Haggai and Zechariah, Ezra 5:1) encourage them. Ezra’s trust is clearly represented in 8:22, where he is ashamed to request a protective guard for the fortune in treasures he carries, instead trusting in the hand of God for protection. Ezra’s prayer in Ezra 9, Nehemiah’s prayer in Nehemiah 1:5-11, and the people’s covenant prayer in 9:5-37 are the outcome. Faith precedes confession, because we don’t fully understand how badly we fall short until it’s revealed to us. Even then, we ne
Read more

1 Samuel 28-29; Psalm 106; Romans 10

  June 4 : In Job 34:14 and Psalm 104:29, the authors make the point that if God withdraws His Spirit, we die and return to the dust. In today’s three passages, I see how crucial His continual presence is in my life. He withdrew His Spirit from Saul, and it upended his reign and legacy. He sent leanness to the souls of the Israelites in response to their repeated concupiscence and whining at Him about what He was providing. The religious leaders in Israel by the New Testament times had been purified to some extent of yearning for carnal pursuits and of literal idolatry by the captivity’s exposure to a carnal and idolatrous culture, but they had become religious relativists, taking their extreme fastidiousness about the Law as evidence of their holiness, while ignoring the purpose of the Law, which was to make them dependent upon God, to be ready for His salvation, to long for the true holiness they couldn’t find in themselves. As Paul has said, I have to avoid the ever-present temptati
Read more