June 24: How we need the work of the Spirit in our lives! Like our surface understanding of the Old Testament narratives, without God arresting us, giving us insight and empowering us, we can oversimplify events in our own life, at once setting ourselves up for disappointment with a too-optimistic expectation of “victory unto victory” or a too-hopeless picture of unrecoverable failure. Our limited knowledge of the Northern Kingdom makes it difficult to picture faithfulness among them: Idolatrous calf-worship at the extremities of the land, all wicked kings, rebellion and captivity. Yet it was the Northern Kingdom about which God said, “I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him.” (1 Kings 19:18) Hopeless as any situation may sound, God can make a way.
1 Kings 1: David is in sharp decline as 1 Kings begins, and we see something of the intrigue going on in his kingdom as a result. Was Adonijah trying to take advantage of David in his weakness? Yes. Did Bathsheba and Nathan manipulate him? It seems so, but did they do this because he’d become too confused to take the action he’d normally have had the discernment to take? Still, it shows us that we have a limited understanding of the stability of the situation and helps us see how Jeroboam was able to take advantage of Rehoboam’s limited understanding.
Psalm 119:33-48: The question that leaps out to me in this section is, what part of pursuing God is (passively) given to us and what part is (actively) pursued by us? The Psalmist’s repeated request is for God to act upon him:
- teach me the way of your statutes
- give me understanding
- make me to go
- incline my heart
- turn away my eyes
- quicken me in thy way
- take not the word of truth utterly out of my mouth
Given these acts of God upon himself, the Psalmist will:
- keep it to the end
- keep the law & observe it with his whole heart
- answer those who reproach him
- keep the law forever and ever
- speak before kings of God’s testimonies
- delight himself in God’s commandments
- lift up hands to God’s commandments & meditate in statutes
It makes me think of Philippians 2:12-13: “…work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.” We request that God save us and empower us by His Holy Spirit, then we walk out that salvation and count on His power to do that which is good. Like Jeremiah pictures Ephraim: “turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the LORD my God.” (Jeremiah 31:18)
John 4:25-54: If the Samaritans’ religious tradition included only the pentateuch, where does her knowledge of Christ come from? The literal word only appears in Leviticus, and it speaks only of the priest. It seems likely to me, therefore, that the Samaritans’ tradition is a little more nuanced—after the return from Assyria, adherents must have declared canonical only the Torah, but as they’d had a history of the united Kingdom under David and Solomon, they must have retained the trajectory established by the Psalms and Proverbs. She obviously wouldn’t have been considered a religious person, yet she knew some important things about the role of Messiah.
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