1 Kings 13 – As Jeroboam begins to offer sacrifices
to the gold bull-calves he set up at the Bethel altar, a “man of God”
(“prophet” in other versions) from Judah “denounced the altar and predicted
that it would fall apart. He also prophesies that someday a child named Josiah
will be born to the family of David and will slaughter those “serving at the
pagan altars who offer sacrifices” and he “will burn human bones.” There are a few key prophecies in this confusing
declaration. Some are immediately realized and others, like the eventual
killing of the false priests and the burning of human bones to make the altar
unclean or off-limits in some way will not come to pass until the time of
Josiah in 2 Kings. When Jeroboam goes to seize the prophet, his [Jeroboam’s]
hand withers. And the altar does collapse as prophesied, so Jeroboam rethinks
what he is doing and asks the prophet to pray for him and restore his hand. The
prophet does this, and the king asks him to come home with him and be rewarded.
The prophet of
Judah declines this offer, saying he must return to Judah by a different path.
On the way he encounters another prophet, this one an old man from Bethel. Hearing
from his sons what the prophet of Judah had done, he goes out and finds the man
and invites to his home. The man of God tells him that he can’t because God has
told him not to go back, but the old prophet claims he too has had a word from
God telling him to bring the man back—so he convinces him to go back.
At the dinner
table, the word of God comes to the prophet from Judah and reproves him for not
obeying his original direction. It
is revealed that he shall not return to his home. And sure enough, on the way
back a lion kills him. The old Bethel
prophet learns of it when people traveling the same road tell him they saw him
dead between his donkey and a lion (13:25). The old prophet goes and gets the
body, brings it back and mourns over it. He realizes somehow that the prophecy
the man made against the altar at Bethel and all the “high places” will be
fulfilled. He instructs his sons to bury him alongside the man of God when he
dies.
Jeroboam
continues setting up the high places: “This sin on his part brought about the
ruin and total destruction of his dynasty” (13:34).
The
competing “openings” or revelations we see here in the “man of God” fro Judah
and the “old prophet” of Bethel are interesting. Each man acts out of his sense
of what God is opening to him and neither really can “know” which one will
prove to be authentically from God. The “man of God” defers to the other
prophet, and finds in the end that it was wrong to do so. The other seems sure
God meant for the “man of God” to visit with him, but in the end he seems to
see that God really had wanted something different – that the instruction the
“man of God” told him he had to NOT come to the his house, was the true
prophecy. One doesn’t get the feeling that either one was insincere. Time is a necessary dimension to truth just
as it is to physicality (a la Einstein).
Philippians 3 - Paul begins to conclude his letter
with a renewed call for his readers to rejoice. But he warns them not to be misled
by those whom he call “those dogs” (3:2), those “who insist on cutting the
body” (3:2). The people who have “received the true circumcision” are those who
“worship God by means of his Spirit and rejoice in our life in union with
Christ Jesus” (3:3). He [Paul] has the “fleshly circumcision” and every other “fleshly”
connection with the people of Israel, but these are not seen as strengths by
him any more—now that he has come to know Christ. “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I
may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that
comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the
righteousness from God based on faith. I want to know Christ and the power of
his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in
his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (3:8-11).
These are
beautiful words that capture so well the overriding vision Paul has of
salvation. For him salvation
seems eminently personal, being gathered up into the very person, life and work
of Jesus Christ. In that is his
(and our) glory.
Paul
addresses the matter of whether his sense of salvation amounts to “perfect
maturity” and he declines to make this claim. But he continues to live and act on the faith that he will
attain to it (like an athlete who strains for the victory at the end of all his
striving). The people whose minds “are set on earthly things” will end in a
hell of their own making.
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