Biblical Meditations

The best way to give you the flavor of these unusual meditations is to let you read one. The rest follow suit.

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MEETIN’ AT THE BUILDING SOON BE OVER

EZRA 3:11 And they sang together by course in praising and giving thanks to the Lord; because he is good, for his mercy endures forever toward Israel. And all the people shouted with a great shout, when they praised the Lord, because the foundation of the house of the Lord was laid.

LUKE 6:9 Then said Jesus to them, I will ask you one thing; Is it lawful on the sabbath days to do good, or to do evil? to save life, or to destroy it?

1 CORINTHIANS 6:7 Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because you go to court one with another. Why don’t you simply accept the wrong? Why do you not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?

Seed Thoughts:

That the New Testament is not fully consistent with the Old is clear enough from these passages. In the first we have a robust, confident expression of the Lord’s favor to Israel tied to the creation of a religious monument — a house of the Lord! This strain of human enterprise is ever with us and is the root of all endowment campaigns, etc.

But along comes this Jesus casting a searing question in the direction of religion of all stripes.

And a further note from Paul questions even the fragile legal structures we have created to keep the law of the jungle at bay.

The only thing to think about today is whether the huge enterprise that Jesus calls us to is the building of a great monument to the Lord with bricks and mortar or the winning is miniscule, unseen victories of goodness and obedience recorded in heaven and unnoticed on earth.

Is it not the very dream at the heart of Jesus’ mission that a day will come when these victories will be seen, when our predatory world is turned into a more perfect world of tolerance, respect for the rights of all and help that is a solution, not part of a problem?