"Out Came this Calf" - Thoughts on Exodus 32

Exodus 32 shows that idolatry is always active not passive. Idol worship never just happens to you. The fire of circumstance and the actions of other people are never the reason for your idolatry.

Idols are always fashioned and made. They are formed and nurtured and sculpted and cultivated. They don't just come out of nowhere.

How often are you shocked and reply, like Aaron to Moses, "...out came this calf." Rather then repenting and acknoweldging that you've been fashioning that idol in your heart with "a graving tool" all along.

Let's be like Moses and "grind" those idols "to powder."

Idolaters, "every man his brother, and every man his friend, and every man his neighbor," still deserve to be slayed with the sword by the "sons of Levi."

Thankfully, which Moses cries out to God for, there is "atonement for your sin."

The idolatrous golden calves of our hearts can be cleansed by the spotless Lamb, Jesus, who "takes away the sin of the world."

(Image Source: Wikipedia)

Kiss the Scar

I don't know about you, but I was particularly moved, on many levels, by Slumdog Millionaire.

Tears were very close, and I do mean very...

If you haven't seen it I happily recommend it. Easily the best movie I've seen this year.

Storms

Ps. 107:21:

"For he commanded and raised the stormy wind..."

Listening to the storm and staying up late. Even though judging by storms this is relatively tiny, still...

If God isn't in charge of storms, I must fear storms.

If He is? I must fear God.

Removing the Divide

Eugene Peterson on the false Sacred-Secular divide:

Guardian Angel or Angel(s)? - Calvin's Institutes 6

John Calvin:

"...angels are the ministers and dispensers of the divine bounty toward us. Accordingly, we are told how they watch for our safety, how they undertake our defence, direct our path, and take heed that no evil befall us...

Those again who limit the care of which God takes of each of us to a single angel, do great injury to themselves and to all the members of the Church, as if there were no value in those promises of auxiliary troops, who on every side encircling and defending us, embolden us to fight more manfully." Institutes of Christian Religion, Vol. I, 145, 147

It's not that Christians have one special "guardian" angel--it's that they have several.

Where are the Priscilla's and Aquila's?

As I read Acts this morning I came across good 'ole Priscilla and Aquila. I don't know about you, but I always have a hard time remembering which one is male and which one is female, but for those of you who forget they are a husband and wife team: Priscilla being the wife of her husband Aquila the Jew. I couldn't help but think, and then pray...

Where are the Priscilla's and Aquila's in the church?

Where are the husband and wife teams who BOTH know the Scriptures so well to train fervent teachers like Apollos who aren't quite getting the Bible right?

Oftentimes you find couples where one knows the Scriptures well, but not often do you find both.

May God give the church both.

Millenial Madness

Christopher Wright:

"[The Millenium] means a period of one thousand years. When you think of the amount of controversial theological and popular theories that surround it, it may come as a surprise to learn that the term is actually found in the Bible in six verses of only one single chapter--Revelation 20....

Yet people have built whole timetables, theologies, and complicated schemes of interpreting the rest of the Bible upon their understanding of a phrase that comes just six times in six verses in its final book. Whole denominations have formed around the differences of opinion!...

My point is simply that we need to avoid getting sidetracked into a whole jungle of arcane interpretations, built on shaky assumpitons about a term that occurs in one single short passage and nowhere else in the Bible. That does not mean that it doesn't matter. It means that the millenium probably is not such a central part of what we need to focus on when thinking about the end of the world as some people make it out to be." The God I Don't Understand, 164.

My Wife

I love my wife.

She is mine by grace and in the grace of life.

A gift of God.

A good thing.

And evidence of God's favor in my life.

Substitution Essential to God's Work at the Cross

Christopher Wright:

"...the Bible uses different metaphors as ways of conveying the multifaceted truth about what God accomplished through the cross of Christ and what that accomplishment can mean for us when we put our faith in him. This basic affirmation, however, at the heart of the Bible's interpretation of the cross, namely, that it was an act of God in which God in Christ put himself in our place is an act of substitution for our benefit, is not really a metaphor...

the act of substitution seems not to be a 'something else' that we can use as one way of talking about a different reality--namely, what God did at the cross. Rather, there is something inescapably essential about this. Substitution is not a metaphor for what God did; it is what he actually did. God actually did choose to put himself in a place where we should be, to do for us what we could not do for ourselves...[this] is not one metaphor among others, but the core reality that then presents itself to our understanding through the variety of metaphors and analogies that the Bible uses to appreciate the vast rich reality of all that God achieved by that self-giving, self-substituting act." The God I Don't Understand, 125.

"Why"

Christopher Wright:

"To me it is a profoundly moving thought that the word that introduces our most tormenting questions--'Why...?'--was uttered by Jesus on the very cross that was God's answer to the question that the whole creation poses." The God I Don't Understand, 21