Author: Bryan Richardson

Re Verse reading–1 Corinthians 15 (Day Three)
“Then he appeared to James…”  The Lord’s brother James mocked Jesus with skepticism-fueled condescension.  James and others in the family thought Jesus mentally unstable.  Disbelief and disdain marked James’s perception of Jesus.  But then James changed.  One could say that James suffered from such deep guilt or grief over the death of Jesus that he bought into the myth of resurrection.  Certainly some do say this.  But to encounter the writing of James in the New Testament, and to read in Acts of his leadership of the church at Jerusalem is to observe a man living from a position of strength, not a position of sorrow.  As was the case with the whole church, resurrection provides the best explanation of James’s robustness.  The question really isn’t what caused the change; the question is instead: Do you believe the answer?

Re: Verse reading–Deuteronomy 34 (day three)  “He buried him in Moab, in the valley opposite Beth Peor, but to this day no one knows where his grave is.”  God buried Moses.  Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus.  What was not well-understood by the Hebrews and what was only dimly understood by Jesus’s contemporaries is what we now know full well from the resurrection of our Lord: Those whom death seems to have claimed will live again.  God placed the body he had made into earth that he had formed.  The source of life will not be thwarted by death.  Jesus’s grieved not because death had bested his ability (indeed, he raised Lazarus), but because death had become a way of life for the human race.  The Lord is Lord of all.  From Moses to Lazarus, and before and beyond, death will give way to him.

Re: Verse reading–1 Samuel chapters 8 and 12 (day three)
“And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.”  God gave the people what they wanted.  Isn’t that how we often define the success of prayer?  Consider the words of C.S. Lewis:  “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened. ”

Re: Verse reading–2 Samuel 13-18 (day three)
“O Absalom, my son, my son!”  The last thing on one’s agenda is often the command to affirm the sacred duty of living in the presence of others.  That command is sometimes explicit: “Love your neighbor as yourself”;  “Love the foreigner as yourself”.  It is sometimes implicit: “Confess your sins to one another.”  Behind every sorrow, every anguished cry, every story of isolation, every act of hiding, lying, envy, and murder–behind it all–lies the failure to affirm the sacred duty of living in the presence of another person.  Only God can teach us that.  Until we learn, anguish will be the language most fluently spoken in this world.

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 46-50 (day three)
“Israel reached out his right hand and put it on Ephraim’s head, though he was the younger.”  Over Joseph’s protestations, Israel went against the custom of his people.  He had not forgotten his own deceptively-obtained blessing of the firstborn.  That deception had come with a high price: Life on the lam, a wife he was deceived into marrying, family turmoil, and the terror of encountering his older brother many years later.  Yet God shaped Israel into the father of twelve tribes as he wrestled with God through that turmoil.  As Israel crossed his hands to break with custom, he did so as one who had come to know something true about life.  Israel knew that custom gives order and place to a people, but wisdom, which comes from God, sees a future that custom cannot.

Re: Verse reading–Numbers 13:1-2, 17-33; Joshua 14:6-10 (day three)
“You know what the Lord said to Moses the man of God at Kadesh Barnea about you and me.”  It only takes one moment of clarity to save your life.  When something true gets revealed, and you pay attention to that revelation, and you believe it, nothing will ever rob you of hope.  Not forty-five years of wandering, not growing old, not enemies.  And these things will surely present themselves, and they will threaten you, and they will show you no mercy.  The revelation you once heard–that no one who hopes in the Lord will ever be put to shame, the promise that no one but the Lord will ever make to you, that revelation–will save your life, too, if you pay attention to it, and believe it.

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 41:25-57, 45:4-8 (day two)
“It was to save lives that God sent me ahead of you.” Was everything that unfolded between Joseph and his brothers merely a divine drama, a providential play? If “all the men and women [are] merely players”, where’s the realness of life? Lest we think that Joseph’s life with his brothers functioned as a cosmic end justifying cosmic means, we would do well to consider this: The Joseph story isn’t a nation rescue protocol with a plotline attached to give it pizzazz. No. It’s all real, not a front for a hidden agenda. The cruelty of the brothers wasn’t some strange way of doing God’s will. Cruelty is cruelty, and evil is evil. But God is stronger. Even in impossible circumstances. The story doesn’t get told in order to make the point. The story is the point.

Re: Verse reading–Ruth 1-4 (day three)
“And they named him Obed.  He was the father of Jesse, the father of David.”  If you reckon that a matter will end the way it began, you will be far more than disappointed; you will be correct.  You will stop working for what could be if you’ve already resigned yourself to the way things are.  When you begin to understand that the universe doesn’t run on a clock but instead on a mind, you will seek to think God’s thoughts after him.  It is arrogance that says things can only proceed the way they first appear.  It is hope that says with God, all things are possible.

RE Verse reading–1 Samuel 1:1-20 (day three)
“I will give him to the Lord for all the days of his life.” Reading this story through present-dayeyes will invite us to interpret Hannah’s grief through our current sensibilities: Babies give us the status of mommy-hood and daddy-hood that we highly value; babies give us an opportunity to breathe into them our own sense of how the world ought to be; the way we raise babies establishes our “brand identity” among our peer group. Such values, though, are part of a shift in modern thinking about families in our society—a shift that sees children as a statement we make to the world about ourselves.  We would do well to learn from Hannah: She desired that her son live as the Lord’s statement to the world about the Lord himself.

Re: Verse reading–Genesis 24 (day three)
“He will send his angel before you so that you can get a wife for my son from there.”  Too a great degree, “romance” is a modern notion which sees desire as the component of humanity which must be satisfied–else marriage, employment, or life in general leave a person “unfulfilled.”  Whatever their flaws–and they had them–Abraham, Isaac, the servant, Rebekah, and her father Bethuel understood the concept of a people.  They knew much more rested on this impending marriage than the couple’s happiness.  They were building families, a people, and a nation in the midst of a hostile world whose only light was the Lord.  Personal desire was simply too untrustworthy to pilot such a large enterprise.  When a society knows that, its best days lie ahead.