PSA Bible Reading Challenge 2023-2024

These are two of my favorite books of the Bible.  Job, simply because the story is profound and the love of God and the strength of Job’s faith is self-evident.  Romans because it contains the meat of all of our theology and the reasons for why we believe what we believe.  Let’s briefly look at the beginning of both of these books of the Bible.

The scene is set for Job to lose everything he has  and all at once.  The messengers come one on top of another.  Job mourns and praises God in that order.  The next scene Job loses his health with sores that can only be scraped with a pot shard.  His friends come from far and don’t say a word, just sit with him for a week in the dust of the earth.  Now, those are some good friends, just sitting with Job in the midst of his suffering, not trying to provide any answers, just sitting with him.

In Romans we begin with Paul clearly saying that the Gospel is now open to all of humanity including the gentiles, but God has still chosen the Israelites as His people and there is a benefit to being Jewish.  We look at this term righteous where it is defined in 3:10-11 as a desire to seek after God.  Conversely when God is defined as righteous it means that He is constantly and without fail seeking after us.  That is the righteous God that we serve.

There is a lot to write about in the chapters that we read today.  Philippians is a classic book of the Bible where there are gems scattered throughout.  Everyone’s favorite Bible verse is Philippians 4:13 – “I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”  It may be our favorite Bible verse but do we really believe what it says?  Do we really believe that we can do all things through the power and the strength of Jesus Christ.  What a difference that would make in our lives if that were the case.  

Working our way backwards, we also see that our citizenship is not here on earth, but rather in heaven.  That doesn’t mean that we are so heavenly minded that we are of no earthly good.  It simply means that, as we find in 4:6 that we should not be anxious about anything.  Imagine your life without any type of anxiety because you simply know that all things are p0ssible in Christ.  That is the vision that Paul gives for each one of us.

We then have the kenosis verses in 2:6-11 where we read that Jesus emptied himself for us, that he became obedient, even to the point of death.  This is another example that we have laid before us as to how to live our lives, as servants to the living God and to each other.  There is more, but let’s move on to Psalm 42. All I am going to say is this song, which may be a bit cheezy, but remains one of my favorite.  We used to sing it all the time at one of our churches in Italy.  Nothing wrong with that.

We find ourselves away from a story of the return to Israel and Jerusalem back to poetry in both Proverbs and these two Psalms.  Proverbs read like an instruction manual for those who want to be wise and live a life of safety and security.  This how-to booklet gives us things we ought to do: “a friend loves at all times”, and things we ought not to do: “one who is slack in his work is brother to one who destroys.”

The chapters we read are filled with this kind of advice without any real scheme or reason.  There is no real clear theme that is followed, just a bunch of advice.  When we read these two Psalms we find king David grateful for the faithfulness of the Lord even in the midst of times when things don’t seem so great.  David is able to say consistently and without hesitation: “Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel, from everlasting to everlasting.  Amen and Amen.”

The story of Nehemiah continues but there is an underlying theme that is a bit troublesome to me.  As he tells the story we see interjected throughout this request by Nehemiah: “Remember me with favor, O my God.”  He tells of this story not so much to historically account for it, but rather to build up a repertoire of good deeds that he can show to God that he has been faithful and has done the right thing before the eyes of God so that God can reward him.  Not such an innocent account as maybe we had originally thought.  

But this is where we find ourselves.  The walls have been built up, the people are gathered to gether and the temple is rededicated again as the law is being read day and night.  What a great image.  One time we read the Bible I think for 3 days straight and it was quite a feat and the people who were involved were grateful for the opportunity.  I’m thinking we should do it again.  

Nehemiah does return to Babylon, as he promised the king that he would, and then he returns again as we read in chapter 13.  On his return he finds he has to tweak a few things that were out of order.  Someone had taken up shop in the temple, so he had to kick him out.  And the Levites who served the temple were not being taken care of  and so were not able to survive so they had left the temple and gone to some outer towns in order to farm and survive.  Nehemiah remedied that and brought them back in and made sure that the people took care of them while they took care of the temple.

The story read well.  Nehemiah who was the cupbearer of the king, but also a prophet of God, heard about the renmant that managed to survive somehow in Israel.  Remember the Babylonians had taken everyone into captivity except a few people to tend the fields.  That remnant was telling the tale that the walls were broken down and the gates were shattered so they were completely subject to the whims and fancies of their surrounding neighbors.  There was zero protection for them which meant that all of their sons and daughters would be taken off as slaves and they were constantly under the risk of death.

This made Nehemiah sad and the king, who loved him, noticed that he was sad and it was the first time ever that he was sad in the king’s presence.  What’s wrong?  I’m sad because my people are living this way.  Would you give me permission to go back to Israel, to Jerusalem specifically, and rebuild the walls and the gates?  He is given permission and he goes and rebuilds.  He faces constant pressure from those nations surrounding Jerusalem but he perserveres in a way that is exceptional.  He finishes the walls and the gates and takes a census which gives us close to 50,000 people which is amazing.  Now the story is really ready to begin as things are fixed up and they can look toward the future.

The thematic verse for these Scriptures has to be found in Proverbs 16:18-19 where we read: “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.”  While the Psalms that we read are much more comples than this simple verse, there is a truth to this simplicity which is carried out in what we read for today.  While David extols the steadfast love of the Lord in Psalm 36 he still warns the evildoers that they will receive their recompense.  

David says something curious that should strike us as not really reflecting the reality in which we live.  Look at Psalm 37:25 and you read: “I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken or their children begging bread.”  Well, that would assume that those who beg for bread are not righteous, I’m not a huge fan of this type of thinking.

Fascinating part of the story of Israel here.  Ezra is given the power by the king to go back to Jerusalem and set shop back up.  He is given the power to gather as many Israelites who would want to go with him along with offerings and the elements of the temple that would be used to make sacrifices.  That is quite a bit of valuable material that the king allows Ezra to take with him to a foreign land as a foreigner.  The motivation on the part of the king one can only guess, but I’m guessing that the king respected the power of the Lord and knew that if he fell in God’s good graces that couldn’t hurt him.

So Ezra gathers the people who volunteer to go and notices that none of the Levites are accounted for.  He remedies that and then gets set to set out.  Once he is on his journey it comes to his attention the sinfulness of Israel can be found primarily in the fact that daughters and sons have married foreign spouses and have turned from God to the gods of their spouses.  As a result he requires that all of those who are married to foreign spouses must kick out the spouses along with the children created with those spouses.  Sounds pretty drastic and draconian but that is how we finish Ezra.  The people of God are now pure without any foreign influence.  Wow.

Psalms 33 and 35 reflect the trust that the people have in God and that he will turn away all those who seek the harm of the people of Israel.

We find ourselves quite a few years later than when we found ourselves in II Chronicles.  The people of Israel are still in captivity and the king of Babylon, Cyrus, tells the people of Israel that they are able to return back to their homeland and they can rebuild the temple once again.  But there is a problem.  There are people within the Babylonian kingdom who see the Jews as a threat and reach out to the king and encourage him to change his mind.  They tell him to look at past history and they can see how dangerous the Jews have been over history.

As a result he does and he stops the building of Jerusalem and the temple.  But then the Jews respond and encourage him to look at the past and see how he decreed that the Jews could and should rebuild and that Babylon would actually help in the rebuilding process.  As a result the rebuilding begins once again and we read in 6:16 – “The people of Israel, the priests and the Levites, and the rest of teh returned exiles, celebrated the dedication of this house of God with joy.”  That’s a fitting ending, but we are in the middle of the book of Ezra in the Bible, not the end.

We find ourselves in the waning days of Judah before the entire land and people are taken into captivity, first in Egypt and then to Babylon, pretty much definitively.  Before that  we find the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah mentioned.  We look at the kings and the back and forth between righteous and unrighteous.

Hezekiah comes along and is a super king, not only does what is right in the eyes of the Lord, but encourages the people to do what is right in the eyes of the Lord.  They do and there is peace in the land.  Again, we see this correlation between obeying God and peace.  One of the more exciting places to go in Israel is Hezekiah’s tunnel which is a feat of astounding engineering.  

Manasseh takes over and was a bad egg.  Josiah takes over and everything changes once again.  The change is seen primarily in the discovery of the law of the Lord which is brought out to the people and the people are able to obey and follow the Lord as a result.  Josiah also kept the passover and the people came to Jerusalem to celebrate it with him.  This is the last hurrah, as after Josiah things change and go from very, very good, to the worst it has ever been.  

Jehoahaz takes over and only last three months and then the Babylonians come and carry the people into captivity.  Thus ends the time that Israel was in the land.  From there we see the Israelites live in diaspora until 1948 when Israel became a nation once again.

The flip-flopping from kings who love and serve God and those who do not follow his ways finds its extreme in these chapters.  Ahaz was one of those kings who not only did not serve the Lord but aligned himself so completely with other nations that they invaded Jerusalem and took people captive to the tune of hundreds of thousands.  Judah was becoming a wasteland.  Ahaz at one point says: “Because the gods of the kings of Aram helped them, I will sacrifice to them so that they may help me.”  We also read in 28:3 that Ahaz “made his sons pass through fire”, which is a euphemism for child sacrifice.  This was the most abonimable thing that one could think of if you were an Israelite.  As you should expect.  God was not happy.

Then along comes Hezekiah.  Not only did he do what was right in the eyes of the Lord, but he tried to rally all the other Israelites that were spread out across the land to do what was right in the eyes of the Lord.  A type of diaspora had already taken place, Jews were spread out as a result of being conquered under Ahaz all over the region and beyond.  So Hezekiah sends out notice that passover will be celebrated, even though it was the wrong month and the people were unclean, we will celebrate Passover regardless.  

It reminds me a bit of when we were locked down under covid and one of the first things we missed was Easter and I said when this is finally over we will come back and celebrate Easter together.  I don’t care what time of the year it is, we will declare it to be Easter.  Well, that never happened because instead of ending all at once, Covid just kind of kept on going and going and going.  But this is what Hezekiah did.  When he sent out notice most of the Jews spread out mocked him and made fun of him.  

But they did Passover and it was a glorious thing and the Lord was with them and that began another detente with the Lord and His people.  In the Psalms that we look at for today they are both Psalms of ascent which means that they are Psalms for those who were rising up, like pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem, as if Hezekiah had called the people and they were rising up to make their way into Jerusalem which is at the top of the hill.  Very appropritae.