PSA Bible Reading Challenge 2023-2024

I remember in seminary I took a class and we had to translate in Hebrew Isaiah chapters 1-11.  It was a chore, but I remember specifically chapter 3 because of the many vocabulary words that I had to look up in order to finish the translation.  In so much of the Old Testament Hebrew you find words that are repeated and used over and over again.   Well, in chapter 3 you find a whole new world of words that aren’t used anywhere else in Scripture.  It is a very descriptive chapter that lets us know that God is taking away support from Judah because Israel betrayed God.  

It is in essence a chapter which speaks about the judgment of the Lord on those who do not follow His ways.  It is also very specifically addressed to a nation state.  We do not live in a theocracy, thank God, no really, thank God, but I do often hear people talk about how God has blessed the US in a very unique way.  I’m guessing the reason why people say that is because of the prosperity and the peace that we have enjoyed for so many years now.  But keep in mind how we have said that prosperity is not a direct sign of obedience or blessing.

But this chapter speaks about how God is going to remove from the nation: support and staff, warrior, soldier, judge, prophet, diviner, elder, captain, and counselors.  Instead children will rule the nation, which assumes a maturity that would be wanting.  Everyone will be oppressed by each other and by all of their neighbors.  The young will be totally disrespectful to their elders.  As you follow along I hope you understand the type of society that it is depicting.  One in which none of us would ever want to live. 

But part of this is also the expectation that some day things will get better, and that getting better can only happen when the Messiah comes.  As I said in an earlier blog post: Maranatha!

This chapter gives us some great social ministry verses that would be good for us to know and know well.  Look first at vs. 4 and you will read “they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”  Doesn’t that sound a bit like this:

But the prophet transitions from speaking about a time when we would study war no more, to a time that the people have been humbled and so the Lord of hosts will come again and cast judgment upon them.  It makes your head spin a bit as we read that people will flock to his holy mountain to worship him, but then in the next verses we read that people will enter the caves of rocks and holes in the ground in order to flee from the terrible presence of the Lord.

But it does all make sense within a context of the coming of the Christ.  When God does come back he will turn against anything that is lifted up against him and considered not his ally, but his enemy.  This is indeed considered a time when God will come back and make all things new, and make all things right under his reign.  A part of that would be to abolish war.  Maranatha!!

The prophet Isaiah is the most quoted prophet in the New Testament.  We find the prophet referring to the birth of a child to a virgin (young woman) which then Luke takes and turns it into the classic Christmas story.  This is later on in Isaiah but significant for this time of year.  Isaiah is used often for both Advent and Lent because it is a book which speaks about waiting for the coming of Christ who will free and liberate us from our current condition.  Isaiah was written in a time in the history of Israel when things were pretty bad.  The people had been taken into captivity and were slaves in Babylon.  Isaiah speaks out of that context and addresses the nation of Israel in order to restore their relationship to God which must have been fractured.  Their current state was proof of that fracture.  

There is much upon which we can focus.  I would like to focus on vs.16 and 17 which tells the people of Israel that they need to focus, even while they are in captivity, upon making sure that they “must cease to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, and plead for the widow.”  Often when we find ourselves in times of crisis we don’t do a real good job in looking outward to those who might need help.  We tend to circle the wagons and try to make sure that our families, our loved ones, the ones that we know and “care about” are taken care of.  But here Isaiah states that it is in times such as these that the most vulnerable of our society will be overlooked and trampled upon.  Do not let it happen.

As a result of that message I have always made it a point to make sure that any church in which I serve our focus and emphasis would never be to make ourselves great, but rather to reach out to the least of these and strengthen them and lift them up.  When we try to make ourselves great, then the desires of God will be overlooked.   When we try to rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, and plead for the widow, then I think we will find God’s blessings continue to fall upon us.  When we try to focus on ourselves then I believe God’s hand is removed from us.  This is a great first chapter to introduce Isaiah because this will be a continual emphasis.

Would you be upset if when you get to heaven you would find Hitler there?  Or what if you get to heaven you would find Osama bin Laden?  Or what if we get to heaven and we see people there who have hurt us badly, who have not lived their lives on this earth in a way that you would think might give them an opportunity to ever get into heaven?  Jonah was furious.  “Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country?”  He ran away from God because he did not want the people of Nineveh to hear the Gospel and then repent and then be saved.  They did not deserve to be saved.  There is no place in heaven for Stalin, or for anyone who was a tyrant and an architect of genocide on  this earth.  Isn’t there a special place in hell for all of them?  Jonah was sure there was a special place in hell for the Nineveties, after all, they deserved it.

But they were saved and Jonah was furious.  He went up to see the destruction of the city and fully expected God to act in a way that would have been just in our eyes.  God did not.  God repented, or changed his mind, or whatever you want to say, God did not destroy the Ninevites.  We end the book of Jonah with God teaching him a lesson about the clay and the potter.  We end the book of Jonah with God teaching him a lesson about creator and creature.  We end the book of Jonah with God teaching him a lesson on providence and subject.  We end the book of Jonah hopefully convicted for each of those times that we spoke about someone in light of them not deserving any of the grace of God that we receive from God.  Surely they don’t deserve to have the same blessings that we have, after all, look at them.  Look at us, we are the most of the undeserving. 

It is one of my favorite books of the Bible because I often experience those who feel as if they deserve the grace of God over and above others in this nation.  But the reality is that none of us deserve it, so whatever any of us gets, is bonus.  I can also identify with a prophet of God who doesn’t always feel that what they have been tasked to do is exactly what they had in mind.  It helps me to resist any thought of running away from where God has placed me.

Can you imagine cows wearing sackcloth and ashes?  That is what the message of Jonah describes, the mandate that if you really wanted to show that your country was repentant then everyone, including the beasts of burden, needed to show that they were really sorry.  Look at vs.8 you will see what the king of Nineveh demands, that “people and animals shall be covered with sackcloth.”  How does one put sackcloth on a cow?  I guess one hoof at a time.

I always use vs.10 in this chapter as an example of how our prayers and our petitions to God actually make an impact.  Read vs.10 again and tell me what you hear.  Let me lay it out there so that you can read it again: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring up on them; and he did not do it.”

God changed his mind.  God changed his mind.  Did you read that.  Because of how the people repented, God changed his mind.  The impact that we have upon God cannot be overstated.  Like any good parent who hears His children, that parent responds to the request of His children, so God responds to the parameters that he had established with the people of Nineveh.  If you repent, then I will save you.  They repented.  He saved them.

I want to be sure that every person who is reading this knows that we are able to change God’s mind.  God loves us so much, and cares for our needs and our life so much that if we do what God asks us to do, then that will create a whole change of events which will always lead to our good.  This is at the root of what we read in Romans in chapter 8:28 which tells us that all things work together for good for those who love God.  What a great Scripture this is.

We find ourselves in the setting where Jonah is in the belly of the fish.  While he is in that fish he prays.  That’s not a bad thing to do while you are in the belly of a fish.  As he is praying he focuses on how he called out to God in his distress trusting and hoping that God would deliver.  He states  in vs.7 that as he was dying, he remembered the Lord.

Isn’t it nice to know that the Lord remembers us in every single moment of our lives, not just in these crises moments?  It is interesting to me that here is Jonah, a prophet of the Lord, and somehow in the midst of all these activities he had to “remember the Lord.”  It might be a reminder to us that we should never find ourselves in a place where we have to consciously “remember the Lord”, but rather that a song should always be on our lips.  When we say that we ought to pray without ceasing, taking our example from Paul in I Thessalonians 5:17, it means that we should constantly have the blessings and the presence of God on our mind and be aware of that.

In this sudden moment of clarity for Jonah we then read a proclamation that we are grateful that he makes.  He states: “Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”  Oh yes it does, and immediately after that we see that Jonah is spewed up on the dry land.  At this point, at the end of chapter 2, we do not know yet where this dry land is.  We don’t know if he is spewed up in Nineveh, or somewhere else.  We just know that he was delivered.  Maybe he can go home and continue on his life without that impossible task of bringing the Gospel to the Ninevites.  Let’s see what happens next chapter.

We begin with Jonah which is one of my favorite of all the Bible stories.  The story of Jonah has been used by Jews, Christians and Muslims alike to describe the faithfulness of God for those who repent.  It describes a time period in the reign of King Jeroboam II.  The command to go to the Ninevites was one that would have struck fear in any missionary’s heart.  The Ninevites were ruthless and did not hesitate to mercilessly destroy any nation or people  who might be in their path.  Their reputation was one of being a cruel and vicious nation.  Here is an ancient depiction of the Ninevites and their cruelty.

So it shouldn’t be a big surprise that when Jonah was asked he refused to go, who would ever want to go to this people?  They were also sworn enemies of the Israelites, so if, just if, they did repent, Jonah did not want his name associated as being the prophet who saved the Ninevites from certain destruction.  The Israelites would have wanted and even would have prayed for their destruction.  So he runs, but God pursues.

Don’t get caught up if it is a whale or a fish.  The point is that God sent a creature to swallow Jonah up for three days and three nights.  If you go to Matthew 12:38-42 you will see that our Savior, Jesus, uses this example to describe his certain death and resurrection.  Now, not everyone caught it and understood what he was saying, but when you read it you should be able to draw a pretty straight line between the story of Jonah and the death of Jesus, three days in the grave, and his subsequent resurrection.  

The story and the character of Jonah get more complicated as we continue.

Dear FPC family and friends and journeyers along the 90 Day Challenge road,

We continue to move forward in our study.  It is hard to believe that we find ourselves in the 6^th of these challenges, while also having studied two others along the way.  We will begin this study on the first Sunday in Advent, December 2, and end it on March 1.  We will be looking at the following books of the Bible: Jonah, Isaiah, Daniel, Obadiah, and Micah.  I am especially excited to make our way through Isaiah as we begin our Advent Season as it speaks to the coming of our Messiah, whom we call Jesus the Christ.

Advent is a season which prepares us for the second coming of Jesus.  This second coming we anticipate because it will bring to completion and fruition all of the promises that we read in Scripture.  There will be a new heaven and a new earth, there will be no more weeping and crying, there will be peace over all the earth, there will be celebration and joy spread throughout the planet.  We could do with some of that.

Remember to follow along online with the daily blog at http://www.straspres.org/90-day-challenge-vi.

Your servant in Christ,

Pastor Bob

As slaves in captivity the Israelites are crying out to the Lord to be remembered.  The author laments in vs.7 that it was the fault of their ancestors and yet they are the ones paying the price.  In order to get food they have to make pacts with their enemies.  The entire chapter points to a request from the people of Israel to be remembered in all that they are going through.  

Vs. 19 gives us a bit of a pause and a recognition by the author that even in the midst of this tragic time in the history of the nation: “You, O Lord, reign forever, your throne endures to all generations.”

This is a good place to declare that we are now finished with this 90 Day Challenge.  It is hard to believe that we have made our way all the way through these days.  Our next 90 Day Challenge will start in Advent on December 2.  I can’t wait to begin that one as we start Advent with Isaiah.  We will make our way through the Bible yet!