So, I want to pray.
Just read a little bit from Bonhoeffer about
the Bible, the Hebrew Bible.
So, Lord, what are you after?
What are you wanting, my God, to underline
for us and impress for us in this
whole issue of the genius of the faith
incubated and established in the history of Israel?
You knew what you were doing, my God.
You picked this Semitic people.
You spoke of it and hinted at it
through the scriptures.
That when you determined the number of the
nations, you did so in terms of the
sons of Israel.
Always this remarkable alignment that the nations can
never escape, though they want to.
What is it, my God, that is in
Shem, that is the saving grace for Japheth?
And what has the church lost in its
Gentile character that has rejected its Jewish origins
or its Hebraic origins that must be restored
for the church to be the church?
And ironically, not only to bless Israel, but
move it to jealousy by that very same
thing.
So, bless this sharing, Lord, and bring a
dimension because of it that would give us
a more complete comprehension.
In Jesus' name I pray.
Amen.
In this book of Life Together, he has
a chapter called The Day with Others, and
in it he talks about prayer, he talks
about devotion, he talks about daily Bible reading.
He takes up these majoring in the minors,
we would say.
Where is the weighty last days, radical things
that we look for that would make a
book distinguished?
This book is classic, and yet it's in
the minor things.
How do you conduct a devotional life?
What attitude ought you to have to the
scriptures?
Do you celebrate and esteem what you hear
coming out of the mouth of a brother
that is not some heavy profundity, but just
a word, just an observation, just his own
thought, just his own prayer?
I gave a message in Russia, the first
of a series of meetings with ministers.
We went to this city near Siberia for
this purpose, for a series of meetings for
ministers.
After this first meeting, they never came to
another one, I was forsaken and abandoned, contemptuously,
because what the Lord gave me to open
with is Paul's statement, and where was it
in the first?
Titus, or not Ephesians, one of the lesser
books, the epistolary.
Thessalonians, or Titus, or Timothy, it's in Timothy.
Paul's counsel about how the church ought to
regard widows and slaves.
What a minor note of all the profound
things that could be spoken of, last day's
truth.
The Lord gives me to begin with that.
It was a majoring in the minors, and
it was completely aroused the contempt of these
ministers.
You know what they wanted?
Church growth methodologies coming from America to promote
their ministries, their churches.
And here's a guy speaking about Paul's attitude
toward slaves.
His counsel toward slaves who had come into
the faith.
What possible application could that have for us?
And so when I came home, I think
it was the very first message I spoke
at home.
Remember, I said, here's a message that the
Lord gave me that was completely aroused, and
I shared with our fellowship.
When I finished, you could have heard the
proverbial pin drop.
The minor thing had become major.
It was major because it was minor.
It was a more profound insight into the
genius of Paul as apostle than considering Ephesians
3.10 and his heaviest observations of the
mysteries of the faith.
That this little minuscule hole that had to
do with the issue of slaves and widows,
he tells us what a true widow is.
We didn't know that there is such a
thing as true or false widows.
But in Paul's apostolic reckoning, there is.
It's what their attitude is toward God.
It was an insight in that little hole
that was of remarkable magnitude.
The little things are the issue.
Like martyrdom is not what you do or
how you respond in that final moment in
which your life is taken.
Martyrdom is the sum of all the moments
that have preceded it.
The small moments are martyr moments like with
anger and the various issues that come up
in the life.
So listen to Bonhoeffer on the minor theme
of reading scripture.
Consecutive reading of biblical books forces everyone who
wants to hear to put himself or allow
himself to be found where God has acted
once and for all for the salvation of
men.
We become a part of what once took
place for our salvation.
Forgetting and losing ourselves, we too pass through
the Red Sea, through the desert, across the
Jordan, and into the promised land.
With Israel, we fall into doubt and unbelief
and through punishment and repentance experience again God's
help and faithfulness.
Does that need to be read again?
I will.
What he's saying is God puts before us
as believers, and especially Gentile believers, the supreme
privilege of a vicarious identification with the subject
of the scriptures, namely God's redemptive work toward,
through, and in Israel.
That the genius of God is revealed in
his activity toward Israel, both in judgment and
forgiveness, in everything.
So there's a way that you can read
that and note with interest and have some
minor value, but what he's campaigning for is
that the scriptures are God's door into vicarious
identification.
If somebody has the dictionary on the table,
look up the word vicarious.
I've used it now several times.
The big green book.
Give it to Simon.
Because if we miss that word, we miss
the whole thing.
Let me read this again.
Reading it carefully and slowly.
Consecutive reading of biblical books.
What does that mean?
You do not play spiritual roulette.
Eeny, meeny, miny, moe.
What's God's scripture for today?
And the remarkable thing is how often that
scripture is appropriate.
But however much the Lord might be gracious
in giving us something of value in playing
spiritual roulette, the real object as believers is
a systematic, consistent reading of the scriptures.
And reading it in a particular way so
as to enter into the experience of that
which is being described.
And I noticed when Tom used 1 Corinthians
10 last night, I was reminded, Paul begins
by saying, now remember, as your ancestors did,
that they passed through the sea and the
cloud unto Moses.
Your ancestors?
Who's he talking to?
Jews?
He's talking to Greeks in Corinth.
And he's saying that Moses and the Israel
that went through the sea and the cloud
are their ancestors.
Hey, where's this guy coming from?
Come on, get real.
That is real.
They're your ancestors.
And unless you see it that way and
enter into their experience, you're missing a great
deal and remaining Gentile-ized when God wants
to break us up.
You know that in the Passover, when it's
enacted in the Jewish home, the youngest son
asks the four questions, the fear manashtana.
Excuse my pronunciation.
Why on this day do we recline when
on other days we eat erect?
Why on this day do we eat bitter
herbs when in other days we don't?
Why on this day?
He asked four prominent questions so that the
father in answering them gives the story of
the Passover and rehearses the children in what
was the experience of their ancestors.
And then in Jewish tradition, there's the wise
son who receives the benefit.
There's the young son, the immature son.
But the wicked son is the one who
says, what has this got to do with
me?
In Jewish tradition, it's called wicked.
So that's the obverse of what this brother
is saying of how we need to identify
with our ancestors.
You're privileged.
You have Abraham for your father.
In the other book that I have with
me, I received yesterday, interestingly, also a German
scholar, German theologian speaking about the Hebrew inheritance.
What a paradox.
And there he talks about our Abrahamitic inheritance.
Okay, Simon, vicarious.
Vicarious, acting for another, filling the place of
another, substituted in the place of another as
a vicarious sacrifice, vicariously in the place of
another by substitution.
Okay.
I'll tell you what's happening to me as
I'm reading now the episodes in the life
of Jesus.
If I had not mentioned this before, they
have always been instructive.
But now I'm seeing them not only as
events that have actually taken place in history
and time, but taken place for the reason
that we might be instructed in the last
days, that the father in his great wisdom,
who knows the end from the beginning, had
and put before Jesus episodes that were valid
in that time, but valid for all time
so that we can enter into that and
receive a value for the last days, because
it was given to us through his experience
when we receive it vicariously.
A wonderful example and a text that I
enjoy using is Mark 9 of the inability
of the disciples to cast the demon spirit
out of that boy who wallowed in fire
and in water.
And that when Jesus said, how long has
he suffered this?
The father says, since childhood, since infancy.
You get the impression that this is not
just a little freaky accident that came when
they descended from the mount of transfiguration, but
a calculated event that is symbolic and fraught
with great meaning.
For if the powers of darkness were not
just merely harassing this child since infancy or
almost since the inception of his life, their
intention is more than harassment, but destruction.
The father says, so as to destroy him.
Well, who is the son then?
He's the symbol of Israel himself.
And what shall be the last days frenzy
of the powers of darkness to take this
Israel when it's down and frothing at the
mouth in its own fits the consequence of
its own sins and take it like a
rag doll and shake the stuffings out of
it until it's finished.
And that's what that spirit did.
Even when Jesus commanded to come out of
him, he didn't come out without one last
spiteful attempt, not just to harass, but to
get the life out of him that when
he was, when he let him go, they
said that boy's dead.
He's a corpse.
Jesus had not only to deliver him, he
had to raise him.
And the disciples could not do it.
Though he had given them the authority to
confound the powers of darkness, and they came
back boasting, even the demons are obedient to
us, but yet they did not have the
authority for this demon, for this was ultimate.
And that's a picture of the last days.
And so they said, why could we not
cast this out?
Because this kind, this ultimate kind cometh not
out, but by fasting and by prayer.
So evidently there was a dimension lacking in
the disciples that Jesus possessed, not because he
was the son of God and retained his
deity, but because he had a relationship with
the father through a daily communion in prayer
that was more than just plying his petitions.
And in that communion, something is taken into
our spirit of the one with whom we
are in communion, that is the very substance
of himself, his majesty and his authority.
And when Jesus came to the point of
confrontation and collision, that was manifest in his
speaking, come out of him and do not
enter him again.
So that's a statement for us.
We're going to face those demons in the
last days, shaking the stuffings out of Jews.
And unless we have the authority comparable to
Jesus, we will fail like the disciples before
us.
And the issue is not turning up the
amplifiers, but prayer and fasting.
But prayer in dimensions that we have not
known because we are so utilitarian that all
we do is give God our petitions, help
me in this, do this, this is coming
up, I need this and that.
But we don't linger beyond that and stay
in the place of communion, prayer as communion,
for that's where the substance and the reality
of very God is transmitted by those who
will linger in his presence even when the
presence is not felt.
So I'm just giving one example of how
an episode in the life of Jesus is
the most remarkable instruction for us upon whom
the ends of the age have come.
If we will receive that and enter in,
you know what we need to do?
We need to feel the mortification and the
embarrassment of the disciples who could not cast
it out.
And that after coming down from the mount
and seeing Jesus transfigured and hearing the voice
of the father and they could not bring
that sense of glory and majesty to the
point of collision.
Would we have done better?
We need to see ourselves with Peter denying
Christ before the cock crows three times, with
curses and with oaths.
See, this is what he's talking about, how
to come into the scripture if we are
to receive the benefit by consecutive reading and
not spiritual roulette of biblical books forces everyone
who wants to hear to put himself or
allow himself to be found where God has
acted once and for all for the salvation
of men.
You want to be where God has acted.
You want to be at the base of
the mount that was wreathed in fire where
Moses went up and came down with the
commandments.
You want to be dancing around the golden
calf, nakedly and reveling in the idolatrous fit
to which Israel had fallen.
You want to put your sword on the
side and go in and out of the
camp and let every man slay his father,
his brother and his friend and that they
be consecrated as the priests of God.
For the word consecration means having your hands
full of blood.
If that will not transform a believer, transfigure
his life and bring dimensions of depth, seriousness
and the reality of God, how far God
will go in requiring of men judgment, how
far men will fall.
And this is our inheritance.
You can read it as one way or
you can read it as another.
There's reading and reading.
There's faith and faith.
There's prayer and prayer.
There's love and love.
There's ministry and ministry.
So the world has not fitted us to
read like that.
It has only taught us how to read
Gone with the Wind or Tarzan and the
Apes or a manual on how to put
your spark plugs in and do the timing.
The world is not teaching us how to
read.
Reading is a phenomenon.
Speaking is a phenomenon.
And we need to esteem all of these
functions that constitute our humanity.
And if we're reading just like a bunch
of mindless blah blah blah blah blah and
speaking equally as mindlessly, our humanity will become
depraved rather than God-like.
So we need to read as putting ourselves
in and allowing ourselves to be found where
God has acted.
We become a part of what once took
place for our salvation.
That's the vicarious.
Forgetting and losing ourselves.
What is he saying here?
That we want to get away from this
terrible, haunting preoccupation with ourselves where we love
our love of God rather than God himself?
One of the ways that God provides is
the scriptures.
When you come into the great saga, S
-A-G-A, of God's great redemptive sweep
through the history of Israel, where do you
have time or even disposition to contemplate yourself
and your spirituality and where you are?
It dismisses even that kind of consideration.
You're brought into another atmosphere.
Forgetting and losing ourselves, we too pass through
the Red Sea, through the desert, across the
Jordan into the Promised Land.
How would you like to put your feet
in the Jordan and see it part and
remain there until all Israel passes through with
its women and children slow and plodding while
that bank of water that has parted when
your feet went in is pulsating and threatening
to break at any moment and to overwhelm
you and cast you away into death?
You want to be a priest?
First one in, last one out?
You can be it in the book of
Joshua.
Don't read it about them, read it about
you.
Forgetting and losing ourselves, we too pass through
the Red Sea, through the desert, across the
Jordan and into the Promised Land.
How should we talk about coming into Zion?
How do we sing that?
Da-da-da to Zion, da-da-da
to Zion.
Let's go out to Zion, the city of
the Lord.
We can sing it while they're singing and
singing.
Just as there's reading and reading, just as
there's speaking and speaking.
We can sing it with a little bit
of gusto, but to sing it with a
full comprehension has to come from an identification
with those who have come into the land
of promise.
For that's our destiny also.
And our destiny will be heightened and made
more real because of our identification with those
who have preceded us and whose experience is
transcribed or written for our admonition.
All this is not mere reverie, but holy,
godly reality.
In fact, I'll go further than Bonhoeffer.
It's reality itself.
How can there be reality if we have
turned our back on this record?
If we have only been nominal and have
only done it under obligation, what reality then
can we have in the present if we
have not fully appropriated the reality that is
the past and that has been written for
us?
This is reality.
How God has acted is reality.
We are torn out of our own existence
and set down in the midst of the
holy history of God on earth.
Time out.
A moment's reverence and silence for such a
statement.
We're torn out of, and it's the only
thing that will tear you and separate you
out from your own existence as Gentiles.
Dear Saints, it's a fearful thing to look
into the face of an unregenerate Gentile.
Remember what I said in that shopping mall
in that city in Germany where I was
invited to speak at that evangelization.
Your faces do condemn you.
Nothing has changed.
And I owe it away from brutality and
murder.
It's there.
You've never been redeemed, and nor has the
history of the Holocaust and your horrors in
any way affected you.
You've not read them.
You've not considered them, and therefore you're equally
capable now for what you performed then.
That's why Jesus could say to those who
were garnishing the tombs of the prophets, as
your fathers did, so do you also.
Nothing has changed.
You've not benefited from the past.
You've rejected the past, and therefore your capability
for cruelty remains.
An unregenerate Gentile is a fearful thing, especially
the German and the Japanese forms.
But I would suspect anywhere.
What have we performed in this country in
the South?
How many black men have been lynched and
burned?
And how far back do we have to
go when that black man was towed behind
a pickup truck by a bunch of white
roughnecks who just towed him through the streets
and out into the suburbs until his head
rolled off his body and had a blast
doing it?
There's nothing more fearful than unregenerate men and
no greater provision of God than the history
of his dealings with Israel, that they might
be tempered and sanctified and be brought into
a Hebraic place.
And don't think that Jews are not any
less capable of the same cruelty and the
same brutality if they themselves are not benefited
by the experience of their own ancestors.
If they're only looking at this as Bible
stories at best and have rejected it as
myths and fables, they're losing the tempering benefit
of their own history.
And recent, the conduct of present Israel reveals
it.
We are torn out of our own existence.
And I'm not condemning Gentile.
This is not a Jew speaking in some
superior way.
But what are pagans?
What are those who have burned their children
and taken the hearts out of their enemies
and eaten them and the vile, filthy practices
of men, their brutality against what is created
in God's image because they have not the
sanctifying influence of God.
It's a blessing to bring to the most
remote tribes on the earth the history of
Israel and the God of Israel.
For only in his relationship with them is
he revealed as God.
And in the absence of that, in whom
shall they believe?
But their animistic spirits and the Baal worship
and goddesses and all of the other filthy
things that have to do with temple prostitution
and so on.
Their God dealt with us.
Somebody may want to read Hosea, chapter 12,
verse 4.
Anybody quick to turn to that?
Hosea, chapter 12, verse 4.
And a remarkable statement that when God dealt
with Jacob in Jacob's flight in the wilderness,
he was dealing with us.
Anybody have that?
He struggled with the angel and overcame him.
He wept and begged for his favor.
He found him at Bethel and talked with
him there.
Okay.
What version of the Bible is that?
NIV.
Okay.
Anybody got the King James?
It will say, he met him at Bethel
and talked with us there.
Yeah.
Read that.
This is the New King James, but it
still says it.
Yes, he struggled with the angel and prevailed.
He wept and sought favor from him.
He found him in Bethel, and there he
spoke to us.
I'll bet you that when the NIV translators
came to that, they said, well, of course,
that's a physical impossibility.
How could he speak with us when he's
dealing with Jacob at Bethel?
Because of their literal mindedness and not understanding
the mystery of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer sees, they
altered it and made it grammatically and rationally
more acceptable.
But I'll go for the King James and
the New King James.
There he spoke with us.
Why?
Because we're Jacobs ourselves.
Because we're supplanters ourselves.
Because we're wheeler dealers and schemers and taking
advantage.
We're all Jacobs until we're Israel.
So he spoke to us at Bethel.
There God dealt with us, and there he
still deals with us, our needs and our
sins in judgment and grace.
It is not that God is the spectator
and sharer of our present life, however important
that is, but rather that we are the
reverent listeners and participants in God's action in
the sacred story, the history of the Christ
on earth.
That story, that history, I wrote here in
the margin, is stronger and the only antidote
to the power of personal or national subjectivity.
How do you avoid becoming nationalistic and wallowing
in your Germanic pride or your French pride
or your English pride or your white pride?
It's by coming into this account and being
participant in God's action in the sacred story.
There's a power in God's history with Israel
in judgment and mercy that breaks the power
and exceeds the influence that comes to us
in the world through race, through nationality, through
gender, and through any other kind of thing
in which we would find our identity.
If our identity is not here, then we'll
be subject to having our identity formed in
the world and then be nationalistic, proud, and
all the kinds of things that we see
in the world and in men and in
the church itself.
Because though it has this heritage, it has
not invested itself in it and received the
benefit and the power that would break the
influence of culture.
The Germans were all too German.
Shakespeare said, human, all too human.
English, all too English.
French, all too French.
When I was in Scotland, Edinburgh, I think
it was, there was a mosaic in some
national monument for World War I, a beautiful
mosaic, I mean, all along, all over the
wall, showing soldiers prostrate on the battlefield or
holding up the great, what is the English
flag called?
Union Jack.
Ours are stars and stripes.
Union Jack.
The Union Jack.
And behind the Union Jack and the soldiers
falling or dying or being brave is Jesus
at the cross.
I thought to myself, what the heck is
this?
Excuse my language.
How does he get figured into this, factored
into this, as if his whole purpose is
to subliminally support nationalist expression on the battlefield
with the Union Jack and the bravery of
men and the national purposes, national, national, nationalism,
as if Jesus is a supplement to nations.
It's a miscarriage.
It's a caricature.
There ought to be a national protest that
God should be sublimated into the national aspirations.
And what nation has that not been?
When the Germans went forth in World War
I, who blessed them but their priests and
their ministers?
And so it is in every nation and
our own because we have not appropriated what
God has given us in the holy, sacred
scriptures that would have broken the power of
these identities.
What has God not given nations?
Yes, they're necessary in their structure to provide
coherence, peace, and stability so that the church
might function in the redemptive purposes of God.
But they are not given as a basis
for the loyalty and the identification of men
greater than that to God, for that will
destroy them.
And history has proved that.
So God's antidote against that, against that nationalist
subjectivity is our participation in God's actions with
Israel.
It had to come in the experience of
a nation chosen for it.
But for us to forfeit that identification with
that nation is to forfeit God as God.
That's not Bonhoeffer, that's Kat speaking.
Did you hear that?
To forfeit that identification is to forfeit God
as God.
God of necessity had to choose a nation
in order to explicate and to reveal and
make himself known in his acts toward them.
And if we forsake that statement and that
revelation, how then shall we know that God?
But if we're proud Gentiles and don't want
to make that identification with Jews or their
history, and in fact for some Gentile Christians,
they don't even want to come so much
to the acknowledgement of the Jewishness of Jesus.
Even that is too much a bone in
their throats.
They cannot humble themselves even to acknowledge that
the Lord, in his manhood, is a son
of Abraham and a son of David.
That somehow, that's a wrong, that's a misrepresentation.
They don't want to see Jesus as being
Jewish.
Well, what will we say of the whole
generation that came to church with the New
Testament and maybe the Book of Psalms?
And the Book of Psalms only as a
songbook, not to bring us into the experience
of Israel, but to have an application in
another separated way.
What a contempt for the Old Testament that
we don't find it necessary, that it's old,
passé, finished.
What percentage of its prophecies are yet to
be fulfilled?
And what descriptions of God by the psalmist,
by the prophets, that no contemporary and even
New Testament writer can exceed?
I'm not talking about Jewish roots in the
way that it's presently being sought.
There's something in that that, though it's near,
it's not quite the same as what I
think Bonhoeffer is wanting to express and what's
in my own heart.
Jewish roots as a curiosity and as a
source of new kinds of pride is the
opposite side of the wrong coin.
Now I've become Judaized.
Now I'm Jewish, I'm a Christian.
Now I'm a Jew.
It's exalting the wrong thing and playing upon
Jewish culture, wearing the yarmulke and the prayer
shawl and taking things from synagogue practices as
if they have some kind of sacrosanct power,
when all it is is the culture of
a phenomenon out of exile.
The word itself, synagogue, is Greek, and we're
exalting the wrong thing.
Bonhoeffer is speaking about something else, something Hebraic.
And the cultural thing is much more easy
to pursue than this.
But the issue is not what's most convenient
or what's easiest, but what is true and
what is God wanting, why has he given
us this remarkable record.
And only insofar as we are there is
God with us today also.
I don't know if I'd go so far
as Bonhoeffer, but I think it needs to
be heard.
What a remarkable man.
Only insofar as we are there in the
history of Israel's past do we have a
present today, a real present, and that we
can be a real testimony and stand for
something that the world so desperately needs because
it is too thoroughly Gentile-ized and brutal.
A complete reversal occurs.
It's not in our life that God's help
and presence must still be proved.
Rather, God's presence and help have been already
demonstrated for us in the life of Jesus
Christ.
If he had said Israel, he would have
said the same thing.
But the life of Jesus Christ, the life
of Israel, is one and the same subject.
It is, in fact, more important for us
to know what God did to Israel through
his son.
Here he says it.
He equates Israel and son as referring to
the same reality, to his son Jesus Christ,
than to seek what God intends for us
today.
More important to know what God did than
to know that which is intended for us
today.
This guy is really going out on a
limb, so underlining and so emphatically stating how
important it is to lay hold of this
heritage.
Because if you don't have it, then whatever
we have for today is going to be
necessarily corrupted.
It will not have it in its fullness
and clarity and purity because that would have
come to us from our embrace of the
past.
So there would be a distortion, even in
the way in which we apprehend what God
intends for us today and the way in
which we would act it out.
And, in fact, that may well be the
statement of the Church.
The fact that Jesus Christ died is more
important than the fact that I shall die.
The fact that Jesus Christ rose from the
dead is the sole ground of my hope
that I too shall be raised in the
last day.
Our truest salvation is external to our souls.
I find no salvation in my life history
but only the history of Jesus Christ.
Only he who allows himself to be found
in Jesus Christ or in the history of
Israel, one and the same, in his incarnation,
his cross and his resurrection, is with God
and God with him.
And you know what?
The life of Bonhoeffer is the testimony to
this truth.
The man died as a martyr.
He lived heroically.
He opposed the false thing that rose in
Germany as Nazism in a nation that had
separated itself from its Hebraic roots.
Nietzsche and other of the German philosophers and
ideologists were offended by that content.
They wanted a Christianity more in keeping with
German national life.
And the thing that most offended them about
Paul was Paul's references to that Hebraic past.
And they saw Paul as the enemy.
They could take Jesus, if he's not Jewish,
and somehow fit him in to their German
national life as a kind of Christianity appropriate
to Germany.
But Paul spoils it.
Paul necessarily brings them into the inheritance of
the past.
Paul speaks to the Greeks in Corinth about
their ancestors as if Moses in that generation
belongs and is part with the present German.
They did not like that Hebraicizing.
You know why?
Because it threatens that which is God.
You cannot be an imperialist nation and have
a history with Israel because of necessity that
brings a tempering, a brokenness, a humility, a
contrition if you have made their history your
own.
But if you have voided it, then you
can go on with your national ambition and
have your ministers and pay their salaries as
Germany does.
The state church pays the salary of its
ministers and provides their retirement as well as
their education in universities, state universities.
It's a system that has voided this past.
And yet the remarkable...
Who's talking to us?
A German who was educated in German universities
and was a professor there and learned his
theology in those places.
It's a remarkable, mind-boggling thing.
So even within German Christianity, there's a lying
and a striving that the greatest scholarship in
Old Testament and in the Psalms is German.
And the other book that I have, if
I don't read it today, some other time,
another German author and a student of Calbot.
And who is Calbot but a German, a
Swiss German?
How much of the Jesus that we know
when we cite the name is the Jesus
that is Jesus?
How much is our own construct?
How much have we omitted distinctive elements in
the constitution of the God-man that is
Hebraic that would give us the truest statement
of what he is, which we so desperately
need if we have omitted Jesus as a
Jew, as the ultimate Hebrew and the Semite
of the Semites.
And that's what the church has either consciously
or unconsciously done.
And therefore, we need as consciously to retrieve
it.
If it went out by a conscious omission,
it will be retrieved by a conscious seeking.
So we need to ask ourselves, what is
the Jesus or who is the Jesus that
we celebrate, whose name we invoke and upon
whom we call and to whom we pray
and relate?
How authentic an appropriation do we have of
this Jesus unless we see him in the
context of Israel as Israel's awaited Messiah and
deliverer and coming king?
Are we going to resurrect or obtain the
truth without effort?
This requires a digging in.
This requires an immersion in the scripture, a
real comparing of scripture with scripture, a real
wrestling to get the content.
Casual reading won't do it, but systematic and
consistent reading and study will.
But we're slothful and lazy and too casual
and therefore we've lost much of this treasure.
We must learn to know the scriptures again
as the reformers and our fathers knew them.
We must not grudge the time and the
work that it takes.
We must know the scriptures first and foremost
for the sake of our continuing salvation.
But there are other reasons that make this
requirement exceedingly urgent.
One who will not learn to handle the
Bible for himself is not an evangelical Christian.
That's going to take time.
It's going to take leisure.
We have to make time for this as
high priority and not just a mechanical morning
going through so many verses or chapters that
you have done your obligatory religious requirement.
Stay with one psalm, but stay with it.
You can always tell an immature preacher, unseasoned
or shallow, by how many texts they employ
in the giving of one message.
This has been my observation.
Whenever I hear a man going through half
a dozen texts to fill the hour, I'm
bored, I'm not engaged.
But give me a man who stays with
one text or one supplementary text and gets
into it and opens that and digs out
that truth and takes the word and opens
the words and their meanings and the riches
and the depths.
How is it that we have one and
we have the other?
The guy who scrambles for a number of
texts can do it maybe in a half
hour.
The man who speaks to us out of
eight texts has spent hours, hours, hours immersed
in that text.
He won't even turn to a commentary until
he has first exhausted every meaning that he
himself can obtain before God by staying with
the text.
Then, having exhausted that, then he'll pick up,
who's the great comprehensive guy?
Matthew Henry.
See what Matthew Henry says over that text
or this one or that one and then
taking and internalizing that.
This takes time, it takes leisure.
So I want to read you a quote
on leisure where leisure is not a quantity
of time but a quality of spirit.
Only in the ambience of leisure does God
know he is listened to seriously.
How you give God time, how you make
available your leisure indicates to God your seriousness
about him and the issue is not chronology
or the clock ticking away that you gave
15 minutes to a half hour.
The issue is a quality of spirit.
How do you attend to the Lord in
the use of that time?
So sacred history, here are my marginal comments,
are itself a sacrament for life.
God revealed in his acts.
How else shall we know what is righteousness?
How else shall we know what is humility?
It's one thing to go to a dictionary
but it's another thing to learn it by
the acts of God, by what he reveals
in himself.
And yet, says Israel, sought to know his
acts but Moses his way.
It's not just the activity but what is
revealed in it of the character of God,
his trademark.
What does he leave of his distinct sense
in what he does?
How shall we know that?
We've got a whole book called the Bible
and Bonhoeffer is the statement of what he's
writing.
He testified to it with his life.
Have I bored you guys with this?
Let's pray, you can join me.
We have about ten minutes before we'll hear
the bell ring.
So Lord, I trust I've not missed you,
my God.
This choice time, of all the good things
that could have been spoken, that could have
been addressed in the way in which it
could have been employed, was there something, my
God, in your heart that had to be
expressed this morning in this way?
If so, I ask you to bless that
sharing, keep it alive in the memory, in
the heart and spirit of these children, my
God, and give us a whole new attitude
toward your word, toward the remarkable collection that
the scriptures are, of your great acts toward
Israel.
And Jesus, as a son of Israel, coming
out of that context, the promised Messiah, and
reflecting the whole tradition, quoting scripture himself, to
verify himself before his own people.
My God, we know that there have been
dimensions lost because of the arrogance and pride
of the church that does not want to
humble itself to recognize, let alone submit to,
its own inheritance, but sought to see itself
as a novel innovation, beginning with Pentecost, and
losing the whole precedent before it, without which
even Pentecost itself is not understood.
For what is Pentecost but itself a high
feast day in the history of Israel?
So, my God, bring this lost dimension back,
bring this quotient back.
For it makes the church the church.
It brings vital dimensions, without which the church
itself is gentilic, mechanical, a Jacob.
Its methods, how to, step one, step two,
programs, a man-pleasing thing, it has lost
its distinctive.
And so we ask this Lord, bring the
church itself into the tent of Shem.
Let it humble itself and bow and enter
and abide there and receive the benefit that
makes the church the church.
So we thank you, Lord.
Precious God on high, forgive us our laziness,
our sloth, our lack of right priority, our
misuse of time, our unwillingness to study, for
study is a labor, and we're too lazy
to perform it.
We never crack the dictionary, we don't look
up key words, we let them slide.
We're minimal, Lord, and therefore we have lost
much, and it shows.
So, my God, forgive us that slack, that
we have not given you the devotion and
attention you deserve in your word, and grant
us a new vigor, out of your life,
a strength, where you can feel the thing
ebbing out of you as it makes its
demand.
German scholars are exceptional, for they have the
tenacity and the grit to stay with the
subject, and their footnotes alone would exhaust us
and leave us limp and hanging on the
ropes.
But they could not conceive of true scholarship
without detailed examination and showing the source from
which they're quoting or citing in footnote after
footnote after footnote.
It's a labor, and it's a labor of
love, and it's one that we have not
entered into as lazy, slothful Americans, and have
lost much.
So, my God, stir us afresh, we pray,
by this morning's exhortation about your word, the
history of yourself in Israel.
And we thank and give you praise in
Yeshua's holy name.