James – Jude

Hey, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Good to have you back with us and we appreciate you listening as we read our way through the New Testament.
A lot to cover today.
We get into several smaller books,
I think all of which are pretty good.
We hope that you will enjoy reading them.
We have a lot of ground to cover,
so we’re going to jump right in.
Michael, a book of James.
You’re going to find,
I think right from the start,
that James has a completely different
tone of what we’ve had before.
Or even in the book of Hebrews,
we jump into what is an incredibly on the ground practical book.
And I would say that this is really,
in many ways, a book just chock full of devotional
moments.
If you get through the book of James and didn’t get hit between the eyes numerous times,
maybe you want to go back and look over it again because it is just full of practical insight.
And you will find this central theme that faith is absolutely essential to the Christian life.
But faith is always paired with works because those two things are intimately connected.
Yeah, an interesting book, historically,
Martin Luther not a fan of this book because of the
emphasis on work, some of his opponents were using it.
It’s not addressed to a particular church,
but to the 12 tribes and dispersion,
in other words, to Christians scattered throughout the known world at the time.
I would say not a theological book in the sense that we’re not really flushing out
a lot of doctrine in this book.
This is all about nuts and bolts, practical,
do this and don’t do this if you’re going
to call yourself Christian.
And I echo what you said 100% Michael,
there will definitely be,
if you give this book
a serious reading, something that convicts you.
It’s broad, but when those lines hit home,
they tend to be felt.
You know,
instead of trying to think of this book as a chronological argument,
I think it’s probably even better to think of it in those very distinct, practical exhortations.
So I look at chapter one, verse 23,
“Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what
it says is like someone who looks to this face in the mirror and after looking goes
away and forgets what he looks like.”
That’s an entire sermon right there in one complete sentence.
I mean, if we listen to what we’re called to be as disciples of Christ and we fail to
let that take root and to bear fruit in us,
we’re as foolish as a person who looks at
ourselves, sees who we are and walks away not knowing who that person is.
It’s that kind of thing that this book is just rich with.
Yeah, and if there was a theme of the book,
it might be the verse right before that,
“Michael, be doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”
I think if you were going to put a theme on this book,
that might be a good place to start.
James is just a hundred percent committed to the idea that if we’re going to wear the
name of Christ, we have to act like it.
We have to live our lives in such a way that that truth is seen in us,
both individually and communally.
I think James does a nice job of crossing over,
so this is not all personal instruction.
There are some challenging words here to communities of faith to the church as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
A theme that you see in the book of James is humility.
He actually talks about how people of high status are often looked up to,
but the people who are in humble circumstances should be held in high regard.
Humility is cast as the way in which we put others before ourselves,
how we recognize that even though we may not possess the right things or we may not have a position of power,
that we are united together in Christ,
and so therefore we should exercise humility in
the way in which all are elevated because of that status.
So that’s another theme that you’ll see here,
and you’re going to see over and over again
these words, faith and deeds,
the idea of what you believe and what you do.
I think I see that you’re at the end of chapter two,
and it goes even beyond that,
but it’s fascinating to see how for James,
the gospel means something for you as an individual.
In other words, your personal faith results in personal discipleship or in personal works,
but that isn’t like you’re saying, Clint,
contained to your individual life.
It bears fruit in a larger community,
and so we should always be measuring those fruits,
not just in how we’ve advanced personally,
but how it situates us in the larger church family.
One of the suggestions of who James was was James,
the brother of Jesus,
who became the leader of the Jerusalem church,
and I will say this letter reads to me like someone who
intimately knows the church.
And very interesting,
though James isn’t writing to a particular congregation,
he covers all of the things that tend to crop up and cause the most problems within churches.
How we speak to one another,
how we speak about one another,
favoritism,
pride,
ego,
it’s all there.
And this could easily apply to any particular church,
though the audience is more widespread
than that.
And you know, Clint, if that’s true,
and that’s the place from which this letter originates,
it’s fascinating to see such a strong emphasis on what we do and the works in opposition
to what we see with Paul,
all this emphasis on faith.
You’ll hear Paul speaking to Gentile communities about how it’s faith in Christ that is the
determiner of our salvation,
not the works that we proclaim.
And Paul especially attributes that to circumcision.
What’s fascinating is for James,
circumcision is really not even in this conversation.
It’s not about the works of the flesh in that way,
the works of the body.
What James has in mind is the actual spiritual fruits that take root in us that are physically
invisible to those around us.
So I think that this letter is just incredible in how it divides between those two things.
It doesn’t disagree with Paul.
He’s not advocating works where Paul is advocating faith.
He’s saying that faith is paramount,
but faith without these outcomes should be 100% suspect.
And the actual outcomes that James names here are really in line with what Paul is encouraging
his congregations to be mindful of.
So it’s really an important perspective of the gospel.
And as you get to James,
I just have to believe you’re going to even hear in it the difference
of tone from what we’ve heard before.
Do you think it’s fair to say,
Michael, that Paul is primarily concerned with what to believe?
And for James,
this is all the second part of that conversation.
James assumes belief.
James takes that for granted.
And he’s clearly writing to people who he considers and who consider themselves Christian.
And rather than what to believe,
he’s telling them what to do and not do because they believe.
This is almost all instruction.
And I would argue very little theological content for the sake of being theological.
This isn’t a doctrinal book.
As it comes to the faith in works,
you know, because of our arguments historically and
because of our place in the Reformed tradition,
we have sometimes broken those into two things.
There’s faith and there’s works.
We separated what I think the Bible pairs together.
And it seems to me that James in some sense is a corrective to that.
If we put James in conversation with the rest of the Scripture,
we clearly see that though
he says words very close to it,
James isn’t teaching that our works save us.
He’s teaching that without works,
our faith isn’t really faith.
If our faith doesn’t compel us to do things,
if our faith doesn’t govern how we speak and
how we act, then it’s ineffective.
It’s meaningless.
It doesn’t really have effect on our life.
You know, Clint, maybe one way to look at that,
you find at the end of chapter 4,
there’s this section where James is talking maybe even a little cryptically about what we say
about our future plans.
And when you read that,
you may or may not find that little confusing.
But what I saw in that in this reading was,
if your faith doesn’t change how you think
about your planning for the future,
then do you have faith at all?
In other words, if you plan your budget and you plan your vacation and you plan your schedule
and you plan all of that stuff ahead of time,
and you do all of that with the idea that
you can guarantee the outcome,
then you’ve left no place for God in your planning.
And it’s just one very,
very specific example of how James demands that everything that
we do should reflect our faith.
So that he ends that by saying that when you do that planning,
you say, “If the Lord be willing,
if God’s willing, this will happen.” And that is a reflection of faith that God is alive and at work in the world and that
God might change my plans.
And it’s a super small example,
Clint, but I think it is an example of how if we have faith,
that faith should shape how we view the world and how we interact with it.
And for James, there’s just all of these very finely honed places in our lives where we
should be shaped by that faith.
And if we don’t see that being shaped,
it should cause us to ask questions about the
nature of that faith to start with.
Michael, in regard to some of the stuff of James,
do you think it’s fair to say that
this isn’t a particularly deep view of sin?
In other words, there’s not a lot of natural depravity.
We look back at Paul and we say,
“I don’t understand myself.
I do what I don’t want to do.
I don’t do what I should do.”
I think James simplifies it and has far less of the human problem of sin in mind than the
Christian decisions within discipleship.
So he says here,
“Anyone who knows the right thing to do and doesn’t do it commits sin.”
And I think he’s not talking about the big picture of what is sin and where did it come
from and what is its role in our life.
He’s just simply saying,
“When we know what we should do and we don’t, we failed.
We failed to live up to our faith.
We failed to glorify Christ with our actions.
And as such, we’ve missed it.” Sin literally means missed mark.
We’ve missed it in regard to our discipleship.
James is one of my personal favorite books.
I like the simplicity of it.
I like the practicality of it.
I can read it over and over again and find it challenging,
find it pushing me in an area
that maybe I missed last time.
I hope people will enjoy reading it.
I think that I’m glad that it stayed in our Bible.
Martin Luther did suggest that it should be taken out,
but I’m glad he failed to get that
accomplished because I really like it.
I think James adds a lot to the New Testament conversation because it offers another pastoral
voice.
I think that complexity of voice helps us.
I think you find the same thing in the two Peters.
You have first and second Peter.
Inside those, you have another pastoral perspective.
It’s not that unique voice that we have from Paul.
It’s not the exact same tone that we find in James here.
You seem to have a pastor who cares deeply about a people’s suffering,
about their holiness in the midst of that suffering.
He is telling the story of Jesus in a way that makes sense of their current moment.
I think it’s really helpful for us as we turn to the book to see that that same hope lives in us today.
Yeah, and I think these two books themselves are different from one another.
I find first Peter very devotional.
I highlighted a lot of verses.
It has a wonderful tone of encouragement as it calls us to holy living,
living that reflects Christ.
I think it’s one of the best introductions to a letter.
There’s a lot of praise language in this book,
but I think people will find in this book
lots of things that sort of speak spiritually.
There’s some practical stuff in here as well.
I think you’re going to see as you look in this book,
a lot of plural language,
a lot of communal language, talk of friends and statements like you are a chosen people.
A reminder,
once again,
that this is being written to community,
not just to individuals.
It’s important that we frame it that way because scripture,
even as it was intended when it
was written, was intended to be given to a people,
that it might form their lives together.
When we come to prayer,
we pray for those who we know to have need in our congregation.
We often name them by name,
but Peter here seems to have a much larger view than that,
that suffering isn’t just something that is carried by one individual,
or pain isn’t just something that we pray for one person.
It’s something that we share together as a community,
and so we all need to be exhorted.
We all need to be encouraged.
We all need to remain holy and supportive of one another because fundamentally Jesus
Christ suffered, and He’s the glue that holds that community together.
He’s the only thing that we all share completely.
Yeah, and to that end,
Michael, I think that as we move toward the end of the book,
He really takes that idea of suffering and it becomes the primary theme,
the idea that if
we live a Christlike life,
it may not be rewarded and celebrated by the world around us.
We may experience persecution.
We may experience oppression.
It’s hard to read the back half of this letter and not assume that Peter is writing to Christians
who are suffering or in some way harmed or threatened by the world around them and the
reaction to their faith.
And Peter is essentially saying,
“Hang in there.
Don’t quit.
Do the right thing even when it doesn’t feel like being rewarded for it.
Don’t be surprised when the world hits back and you are gracious and the world is not.”
What a great message for Christians.
Maybe not a message that the American church fully understands,
but certainly our brothers
and sisters in other parts of the world who are suffering just for being followers of Christ.
This is the kind of letter I think that would be very encouraging in those circumstances.
And I think that there’s also a sense,
Clint, where Peter seems to say similar things in
some ways to James.
And I think I would point to the second book here in chapter 1,
verse 10, where it says, “Therefore, my brothers and sisters,
make every effort to confirm your calling and election.”
I love that language.
Confirm it.
It’s not about actually living out your salvation with works.
It’s not about doing things so that you can be saved.
It’s you have been saved.
You have been elected as God’s chosen.
Now confirm it.
Now let the outside stuff reflect the reality of the inside stuff.
And to people who are in the midst of suffering,
that is a really strong encouragement.
It’s to say, “Hey, listen,
this thing is true in you.
Your faith is real.
Don’t run from it.
Don’t shy away from it.
Holds true to the stuff that really matters.”
And later in the second book,
you’re going to have talk about false teachers again.
There seems to be some people in the community who are saying some stuff that is leading
people astray and confirm your calling.
Don’t be led astray by false teachers.
It’s interesting, Michael, my study Bible says that the second letter of Peter is among
the least read books of the New Testament,
which is probably a shame because there is
some good stuff in here.
And to your point,
early on in the book in chapter 5,
for this very reason,
and the reason is what God has given us in Christ,
for this very reason,
you must make every effort to
support your faith with goodness,
and goodness with knowledge,
and knowledge with self-control,
and self-control with endurance,
and endurance with godliness,
and godliness with mutual affection,
and mutual affection with love.
And what Peter gives us in this short verse is a beautiful map that begins with individual
faith and ends with mutual affection and love for the community,
for brothers and sisters,
even for those that we struggle with.
And this is a really good passage,
the idea that we are confirming our faith.
Again, these conversations we’ve had about is faith enough.
Yes, in the salvation sense,
we’ve argued theologically that faith is enough.
But for the New Testament,
especially these later letters,
faith is only the doorway that
we go through, and it’s only the first of many, many steps.
And to our faith,
we seek to add these other realities.
We seek to live into the grace we’ve been given.
And Peter is a really good addition to that theme, I think.
We’ve already talked about how important that idea of calling is in this book.
You see as you go towards the end of 2 Peter how equally negative running from that calling
is.
We have some extreme language about those who have received the grace of Christ and
who have turned their backs on it.
And that makes sense,
right?
It makes sense to people who are in the midst of the heat of the fire that we got to stick
together.
We have to go the course.
We have to be strong and courageous because it is hard.
And then when you see people turn,
renounce the faith, the fruit of the gospel disappears.
You can understand this harsh language.
Words like, “Those people are like a dog that returns to its vomit.”
Strong language.
My favorite proverb, by the way.
Well, and you can see how in that it captures not only wisdom,
but it captures a mood.
It captures a feeling.
It captures the really earthy reality of what this community is going through.
And to be fair,
we might benefit from capturing some of that today.
So I think, Michael,
that if we can assume that this letter is written to a community
that is struggling, a community that’s facing persecution,
and what we know of some of the
persecution of the late first and early second century is that it was brutal.
There were people being forced to make a choice to renounce their faith or be executed.
There were people facing life or death choices about whether to identify themselves as believers.
And if this is written in that context,
it then makes sense that the author would use
the strongest language possible to say,
“The punishment of renouncing your faith is worse
than anything you will face for holding to the faith.
Worse than anything the emperor or the governor or the military or the soldier or the arena
or the coliseum, worse than all of that would be to have God angry with you because you
knew the grace of Christ,
you accepted the wonderful gift of salvation,
and then you turned from it.” And it sounds like very harsh language to us,
but I think it helps to understand the
context that they may have been in as they’re reading it.
I think one of my absolute favorite moments in reading the book of 2 Peter was right here
at the end, there’s this beautiful cross talk that we don’t really get very much in the New Testament.
We hear biblical authors talking about,
“I’m with Luke,” or “I’m sending Mark to you,”
those kinds of things.
But what you have at the end of 2 Peter is the writer commenting on Paul’s writings.
And it’s fascinating because if you struggled with the book of Romans,
the Scriptures have in them a partner with you.
It says here in verse 15,
“Paul also wrote you with the wisdom that God gave him.
He writes the same way in all his letters,
speaking in them of these matters,
hard to
understand.” So, if there was ever a moment where you read Paul and thought,
“Man, that’s hard to understand,”
we have an account of someone in the New Testament saying the same exact thing.
So you stand on good ground.
Yeah,
literally one of the guys who wrote part of the Bible says sometimes it’s tough
to figure out what he’s saying.
So yeah, you’re definitely not alone there.
And I would just say this is unique.
We don’t really see much of that in the New Testament.
And it is a reminder that we shouldn’t forget.
There are these conversations happening at really,
at that time, a global kind of stale.
But yet, these people know each other,
right?
I mean, they’re all church leaders and they’re all pulling in the same direction.
It’s a big community,
but it’s a very small community,
all the same.
And so we see that right here in the words of the New Testament.
And if there were a theme in this book, Michael,
it may be right here in the last verse,
“Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and savor Jesus Christ.”
I think everything that Peter writes,
and really first and second Peter,
could fall under that heading.
As we turn our attention here to the books of John,
1 John, 2 John, 3 John, we come to books that are historically known to be some of the easiest Greek to read in the New Testament.
In fact,
this is, I think, a pretty standard place for new Greek students to start translating
Scripture.
Very simple grammar,
very easy syntax, but that might betray for us the depth of these
words because it appears that we are being thrust into the midst of a Christian community
that is struggling with some division.
There may be some false teachers whose teaching has gotten subtraction here.
And we hear this resounding Johannine theme,
a theme that we saw in the Gospel of John
is now repeated in these letters,
the theme of the supremacy of Jesus Christ and the importance
of knowing the love of Christ and the love of God.
And that is cast as really an antidote,
which seems to be some significant conflict.
Yeah, the benefit to these letters,
if you’re trying to learn Greek,
is that when you learn
a couple of words for love,
you’ve got about a third of these letters figured out the drum
that John beats constantly.
Well, really, in the Gospel as well as in these letters is what does it mean to love
Christ and what does it mean to love one another.
Some people point out,
Michael, that this reads less like a letter and more like a sermon
or a religious tract that could have even been distributed.
And there’s certainly some truth to that in the first letter where we don’t really have
a salutation.
We just jump right into it.
It’s well organized.
It has a flow to it.
It does have a couple of pretty pointed themes.
And so if it was a sermon,
I would argue that it’s a pretty good one.
I’d like to point out that I think you find here in this book some really significant
devotional material, to be honest with you,
some comments about what it looks like to
love one another.
“Anyone claims to be in the light but hates a brother or sister is still in the darkness.”
It’s a powerful and convicting phrase.
We’re reminded that God is love and that anything that doesn’t reflect love is now the reflection of God’s intention.
This book is just deep with this internal conviction that where we fail to embody the
light of God, the love of God,
this metaphorical representation of God’s love,
if we don’t live in the light,
then the darkness is in us and we’re not called the darkness,
we’re called to light.
So let us therefore shine that light.
Let us exhibit love.
And though that may sound elementary,
all you need to do is look at the modern church
and see those are words easier said than done.
It is hard to love in public.
It’s hard to exhibit grace and to show lives of perseverance.
These are gifts of the spirit that are remarkably difficult to show not only within our community
but outside of it.
And that’s exactly what this letter is commending us to do.
Yeah, again, I think similar to the book of James,
we hear here a call to action.
Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in truth and in action.
So much like 1 Corinthians 13,
the love that John has in mind here is not an emotion,
it’s not a feeling, it’s a way of life.
It’s practical,
it’s active, it’s a verb, not a noun.
It is something that guides us to do those things that love would demand of us or ask of us.
Biblical scholars do point out here that we may have a little bit of a hint of what some
of the conflict in this community was in chapter 4 where there’s this talk about Jesus Christ
being of God.
There is some conversations about the fact that potentially this community is in conflict
over the reality of Jesus’s incarnation,
that who Jesus was is in question here.
And it’s interesting that the antidote proposed for that is to exhibit love because Christ
is love and Christ is the fullness of who God is and therefore God is love.
So it’s an interesting tip.
It may not be right.
That may not be exactly what’s going on here but some have pointed out that maybe the conflict
lives somewhere around that understanding of who Jesus is.
Yeah, and it would be a tenuous connection but if we think back to the Gospel of John
and that wonderful prologue that describes incarnation,
there is a sense I think in which
this letter is telling us that we incarnate Christ.
We live out Christ’s life in ours as we share His love with others,
both in the faith and
outside of the faith.
And for John, it is his primary theme.
I’ve not counted them but the word love has to be in this book 50 times.
Yeah, absolutely.
This book has a point to make and I think it makes it strongly.
In the following second and third John,
you’re going to find within them very pointed examples
of how we are called to be faithful,
how in these very small books you see exhortations, encouragements to Christians,
keep going, keep being faithful.
But you’re also going to see in these books,
third John, you’re going to actually see a person named.
You’re going to hear about those who are failing to be faithful,
those who are actually living
on the opposite side, demonstrating darkness,
demonstrating what it looks like to move away from God.
And in this, I think we all hear a caution that at the same time we’re called to be a
community united by love.
We must also be vigilant to keep out those who seek to divide the community,
that we see in this, that it’s not just the fostering of unity and community,
but we also need to
be vigilant to keep out those who are actively creating disunity.
Yeah, and I think, Michael, that we begin to see – I don’t know if this is intentional
or not, I was thinking about this as we read these books.
We see in John,
and I would argue in the Gospel and in these letters,
this idea that the faith
and the world are in opposition to one another.
You know, early on in the book of John,
there’s a lot about the world,
and we might remember
back to the Gospel of John,
if the world hates you,
it’s because it hated me first,
that discourse that Jesus has with the disciples.
And here again, we see that idea that the world and the faith are in some way opposed
to one another.
They have different values,
they have different assumptions,
they have different practices,
and that we will find ourselves as we follow Christ to some extent out of step with the world around us.
I would say that John also then moves into that in a spiritual sense,
a little bit of
talking about the spirits here.
And I’ve not noticed before that we seem to increase that kind of language as we move
toward the book of Revelation.
I mean, Revelation is by far the most prevalent discussion of that kind of stuff.
But here in John,
we see that, you know, we saw that a little bit in some of those later
books, The Man of Lawlessness and with Peter,
The Backsliding, and now with John,
faith conquering the world and testing the spirits.
And we’re going to then get,
I think, even a better dose of it in Jude,
all it seems to me subtly pointing us toward the motherlode of that kind of material,
which is going to
be the book of Revelation.
That’s really insightful,
Clint.
You can see how as the church continues to grow in a culture that is really set against
some of the core ideas of what it means to be Christian,
that as the gospel continues
to become a louder and louder voice and where the believers proclaim that Jesus Christ
is Lord in a culture that says Caesar is Lord,
you’re bound to have conflict.
And that conflict, as the faith continues to gain momentum,
becomes more and more dualistic.
It becomes more and more clear.
There’s no way of turning away from the Colosseum and not seeing good versus evil,
light versus darkness,
Christ versus the antichrist,
the teacher of grace and goodness and the teacher of destruction.
And we do see in these books,
I think, an encouragement to Christians,
stay the course,
be united by the things that matter,
don’t be pulled away by cultural forces,
don’t be pulled away by pride and the desire to be made great,
stay humble,
stay deeply connected to who Christ is,
and you’re going to be okay.
Yeah, I think an example of that,
Michael, might be the opening verse of 2 John to the
elect lady and her children.
John just simply means the church.
But here we begin to get this sort of symbolic language that I don’t think we saw a lot of,
certainly in Paul’s letters.
And if in fact John is the author of these letters and the gospel and the book of Revelation,
as we’ve historically thought,
maybe that makes some sense that he would begin to use some symbolism,
some metaphor.
But I think I’ve not noticed that we get in these later letters an introduction to what
we’re about to jump into full force in the near future with our readings.
And if that’s true with these three books of John Clint,
wouldn’t you say that’s also true with Jude,
that Jude is even pushing that closer as we get to Revelation?
Yeah, I would say even more.
As you read the book of Jude,
I apologize, but I can’t imagine that there aren’t going
to be people scratching their head thinking,
“I don’t understand what that’s about.”
Jude is going to throw out these Old Testament terms and these Old Testament characters and
then try to lay some sort of spiritual reality on them.
He’s going to talk about angels and fall of the devil and the battle in heaven.
And again, it seems to me that there’s a reason that we historically stuck Jude right next
to Revelation because we’re moving that direction.
That’s about to be the thrust of what we get next.
And if you think that Jude is a little head-scratching,
just wait,
Revelation’s around the corner.
But I would point out here that as we get into Revelation,
and we’ll talk a little bit
about this of some tools of ways that you can think about this style of writing,
we should not make the mistake when we come to Jude to read this thinking of what we tend
to think of as spiritual warfare or the spiritual realm.
I think we have some 21st century ideas of what that looks like.
Jude is writing to people using this allegorical connectiveness of Old Testament to present,
the realities of the world around them being told in scriptural language.
It’s actually a very poetic,
very metaphorical way of writing.
And if you think of this being received by Christians caught up in suffering,
facing questions of martyrdom, having to deal with defectors and false teachers.
This kind of language is incredibly comforting because it connects you to a larger story.
It gives you a framework of meaning to uphold yourself in the midst of adversity.
It situates you within a people and in a time,
and it points you in the direction of Christ.
And this letter is short.
You’re only going to see 25 verses.
But as it leads us into the next major thrust of the New Testament in the Book of Revelation,
you already see some of that framework being built.
Yeah, I think it’s humbling for me,
Michael, to read a letter like this that maybe doesn’t
feel like it gets a lot of traction personally.
And remember two things,
that those who received it are suffering because they’re believers
and wrestling with real life and death decisions about their faithfulness to Christ.
So in the 24th verse, when Jude says,
“Now to him who is able to keep you from falling,”
we will read that in our context and think that means slipping up.
That means yelling at someone in traffic.
That means losing my patience or my temper.
That means a sin that I struggle with.
And I think it is humbling to remember that when the people to whom Jude writes that hear it
completely differently, they hear, “He who is able to keep you from getting arrested,
from getting hung on a cross,
or eaten by lions,
or thrown in prison,
or losing your salvation because you deny him,” it sobers my reading of a book like this.
Can you imagine receiving this letter and reading in verse 14,
“See the Lord is coming
with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones.”
That is great good news.
I’m not alone.
Jesus is coming.
And there’s a whole posse coming with him of all of the people that have been faithful.
That great cloud of witnesses is framed differently here.
And this is such good news to the people receiving it.
Yes.
And I would say that as we read material like this,
and we’ll have this conversation as we discuss Revelation,
but whenever we read these kind of texts,
it helps to remember that the
people who wrote them and the people who read them believed that was any day now,
that they lived in that expectation because it helps us to envision and I think understand some of the
symbolic nature of the way they write.
Maybe by way of providing some summary to this conversation,
we see letters that encourage,
letters that convict,
letters that call out sinners and those who fall away in strong
language and a reminder that in all of that,
we see Christ bearing us up and carrying us closer to himself,
interceding on our behalf.
And that’s great good news for everyone, including us today.
Yeah, I don’t think that we can probably fully appreciate what it is to live in a context where
there’s oppression and there’s fear and punishment for our faith.
But on the other hand,
we live with the wonderful opportunity to pursue those same realities,
love and faithfulness openly,
freely.
We take for granted what the early church longed for,
a place where they were free to peacefully
seek to honor and glorify Christ by the way they lived.
And we have that opportunity each and every day and we should be thankful for it,
mindful of it and
seek to use it.
Friends, this week, you’re going to be turning a corner coming into some of the last stages of our
readings in the New Testament.
Enjoy these books as you read them.
We’ve been thrilled to be able to talk a little bit about them,
to sort of get just under the hood of
them.
And we hope that as you read them,
you will be encouraged as were the Christians who first received them.
Now go out and be blessed.
We look forward to talking with you again next week as we begin the Revelations of John.