Read The Bible

• Exodus 21; Luke 24; Job 39; 2 Corinthians 9

  The September 20 meditation in volume 1 worked its way through 2 Corinthians 9. Nevertheless I want to come back to that passage. Paul’s carefully worded exhortation to the Christians in Corinth—to have ready for him the money they pledged to send to the poor in Jerusalem (chaps. 8–9)—need not be reviewed again. What I shall focus on for today’s meditation is how Paul’s exhortation about giving and money is tied to the Gospel. In chapter 8 Paul invokes the example of Christ’s self-giving: “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). Here in chapter 9 Paul says that, if the Corinthians come through with their promised gift, people “will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity” (2 Cor. 9:13, italics added). In any case Paul never lets Christians forget that all our giving is but a pale reflection of God’s “indescribable gift” (2 Cor. 9:15), which of course lies at the heart of the Gospel. So much of basic Christian ethics is tied in one way or another to the Gospel. When husbands need instruction on how to treat their wives, Paul does not introduce special marriage therapy or appeal to a mystical experience. Rather, he grounds conduct in the Gospel: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Eph. 5:25). If you are looking for maturity, beware of any “deeper life” approach that sidesteps the Gospel, for Paul writes, “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness” (Col. 2:6–7). Of course, there is “deeper life” in the sense that Christians are exhorted to press on toward greater conformity to Christ Jesus and not to be satisfied with their present level of obedience (e.g., Phil. 3). But none of this is an appeal to something that leaves the Gospel behind or that adds something to the Gospel. We must avoid the view that, while the Gospel provides a sort of escape ticket from judgment and hell, all the real life-transforming power comes from something else—an esoteric doctrine, a mystical experience, a therapeutic technique, a discipleship course. That is too narrow a view of the Gospel. Worse, it ends up relativizing and marginalizing the Gospel, stripping it of its power while it directs the attention of people away from the Gospel and toward something less helpful.

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• Exodus 20; Luke 23; Job 38; 2 Corinthians 8

  As we approach the end of the drama, God addresses Job directly for the first time (Job 38); he will continue to address Job through chapter 41. Elsewhere God speaks to Elijah in a still, small, voice (1 Kings 19); here God speaks to Job out of a storm (Job 38:1), for he wants even the form of his communication, or its venue, to substantiate the large points he wishes to make. God’s first words are terrifying: “Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge? Brace yourself like a man; I will question you, and you shall answer me” (Job 38:2–3). This opening salvo might lead the unwary to think that Job is the one with whom God is primarily displeased, and that the three miserable comforters have got off rather lightly. But like a drama that teeters back and forth between this perspective and that, this book is not finished yet. After all, the opening chapter records God’s estimate of Job, and nothing in these chapters reverses that estimate. Further, I have already drawn attention to Job 42:7, where God says he is angry with the three friends (something he never says about Job), because they did not speak what was right about God (as God’s servant Job did). God’s terrifying challenge to Job in these four chapters must be placed within the larger framework of the book, if we are to make sense of the whole. Job has repeatedly said that he wishes to question God. Now God says that he will question Job (Job 38:3). Yet the nature of the barrage of rhetorical questions God raises in these chapters is scarcely the kind of questions Job wants to address. Job wants to talk about his own sufferings, about the justice of them, about God’s role in sanctioning such sufferings, and the like. He wants to do this not least because he desires to maintain his justifiable reputation for integrity and righteousness. But God’s questions focus on a much bigger picture. God asks, in effect: “Job, were you present at the dawn of creation? Do you have intimate knowledge of the entire world, let alone of the heavens? Do you control the course of the constellations—Pleiades and Orion, let us say? Were you the one who constructed the human mind, so that you can explain how it works? Does your word exercise the kind of providential sway that grants food to hungry ravens or to a hunting lioness?” At one level, of course, this response does not at all answer the kind of questions Job was raising. At another level, it does. It warns Job that his capacity to understand is more limited than he thinks. It prepares us for the conclusion that God wants something more from us than mere understanding.

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• Exodus 19; Luke 22; Job 37; 2 Corinthians 7

  Sometimes people present Paul as if he were a cold intellectual. Why “cold” should be connected with “intellectual,” I am not sure. It certainly does not fit Paul. Obviously, God gave Paul a first-class mind. But he was also a man of passionate intensity. In 2 Corinthians 7 Paul testifies that, on the one hand, his joy knows no bounds (2 Cor. 7:4); on the other hand, this joy has resulted from some news of the Corinthians that Paul received when he went to Macedonia. For on his first arrival in Macedonia, Paul had experienced no rest, but was “harassed at every turn—conflicts on the outside, fears within” (2 Cor. 7:5). But then his fears and conflicts turned to joy when he received the good news about the Corinthians What prompted this vast transformation in the apostle’s outlook? (1) Whatever the mechanics, Paul recognizes that the transformation was brought about by God, “who comforts the downcast” (2 Cor. 7:6). In this case God brought comfort to Paul by restoring Titus to him, who brought with him some news of the Corinthians. (2) The news Titus brought was that the Corinthians, however much they had been wounded by Paul’s previous visit and by the painful letter he had sent, had regained their equilibrium. They now longed to see Paul and expressed “ardent concern” for him (2 Cor. 7:7). Titus brought the news that the sorrow evoked by Paul’s letter turned out to be a “godly sorrow” in that it led to repentance (2 Cor. 7:8–10). Sorrow that generates repentance “leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death” (2 Cor. 7:10). All this news of the Corinthians’ reactions has filled Paul with joy and encouragement. This indicates, of course, that Paul is intimately involved in the lives of the people to whom he ministers. His own emotions may go up and down as a function of how they relate to him. But what is striking is that Paul avoids two very common traps. (a) Obviously, he avoids the kind of professional distance projected by some ministers as a protective shield. (b) Although his own joys and sorrows are clearly tied to what the Corinthian Christians think of him, that link is not primarily a personal link. When that is the case, the minister loses his prophetic voice and will say and do only what he thinks will maintain the affection of the flock. Paul has felt duty-bound to reprimand the Corinthians, in person and in writing; he has not flinched from that responsibility. His joy that they have returned to him is thus inseparable from his joy that they have returned to faithful allegiance to the Gospel—the heart of his unbounded delight.

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• Exodus 18; Luke 21; Job 36; 2 Corinthians 6

  One of the most moving visions of apostolic ministry is found in 2 Corinthians 6:3–10. It takes little knowledge of his letters to perceive that Paul is unwilling to compromise the Gospel. He is more than willing to bear the offense of the cross. But equally obvious is his willingness to put up with any personal inconvenience or suffering in order to get the message across. “We put no stumbling block in anyone’s path,” he writes, “so that our ministry will not be discredited” (6:3). By maintaining what he calls “our ministry,” Paul is concerned to sustain not his personal reputation, but his credibility as an ambassador of Jesus Christ, as a servant of God. So he goes on, “Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way” (6:4). This last sentence could be misleading, both in Paul’s day and in ours. For a minister of the gospel today to “commend himself in every way” sounds a bit like an ugly piece of self-promotion. One’s imagination runs riot: the church bookstall selling T-shirts with “I love my Pastor Bob” emblazoned across the front, a stirring fanfare whenever he enters the pulpit, and so forth. The world of Corinth would also misconstrue Paul’s words. So many itinerant teachers were profoundly self-promoting. That was how they gained students—by commending themselves, explicitly and implicitly, as the best at what they did. But Paul’s self-commendation suddenly takes a turn that neither the self- promoting types of ancient Corinth nor their smooth echoes in the modern Western church would want to follow. The framework of self-commendation Paul adopts, as a servant of God, is nothing like the framework of ordinary self-promoters, ancient or modern. Paul and other servants of God commend themselves “in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger” (2 Cor. 6:4b–5). Hard work? Ancient teachers were supposed to think and teach, not work hard with their hands. Riots? Are Christian apostles supposed to commend themselves as servants of God by the way they conduct themselves in riots! Paul presses on: they are also to commend themselves “in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left” (2 Cor. 6:6–7). Then there are all the projections people have of you: servants of God are to commend themselves “through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report” (2 Cor. 6:8). Doubtless they are genuine, but many will view them as imposters. Indeed, Paul winds up his list with a litany of startling paradoxes (2 Cor. 6:9–10). Christian leadership, anyone?

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• Exodus 17; Luke 20; Job 35; 2 Corinthians 5

  Things are never quite as they might be. Or if for a brief moment they are as good as you can imagine them, if for a while you seem to suck in the nectar of life itself with every breath you breathe, you know as well as I do that such highs cannot last. Tomorrow you go back to work. You may enjoy your job, but it has its pressures. Your marriage may be well-nigh idyllic, but in a sour mood you may marvel at how much you cannot or will not share with your spouse. The warm west wind that tousles your hair metamorphoses into a tornado that destroys your home. One of your parents succumbs to Alzheimer’s; one of your children dies. There is so much around you to enjoy, yet just as you begin to chew on a filet mignon that your children have bought for you for your birthday, you remember the millions who starve every day. There is no escape from the brute reality that, however wonderful your experiences in this broken world, others suffer experiences far more corrosive, and you yourself cannot ever believe that what you are experiencing is utterly ideal. That restlessness is for our good. It is a design feature of our makeup, of our nature as creatures made in the image of God. We were made to inhabit eternity; by constitution we know that we belong to something better than a world (however beautiful at times) awash in sin. Paul understands this point perfectly (2 Corinthians 5:1–5). He anticipates the time when “the earthly tent” (our present body) will be destroyed, and we will receive “an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands” (2 Cor. 5:1)—our resurrection body. “Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling” (2 Cor. 5:2). It is not that we wish to “shuffle off our mortal coil” and exist in naked immortality: that is not our ultimate hope, for “we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Cor. 5:4). Then Paul adds: “Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose and has given us the Spirit as a deposit, guaranteeing what is to come” (2 Cor. 5:5). God made us for this purpose, i.e., for the purpose of resurrection life, secured for us by the death of his Son. Moreover, in anticipation of this glorious consummation of life, already God has given us his Spirit as a deposit, a kind of down payment on the ultimate inheritance. Small wonder, then, that we groan in anticipation and find our souls restless in this temporary abode that is under sentence of death.

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