8/23/2023

TODAY’S SCRIPTURE READING:

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. Acknowledge Him in all your ways and He will make your paths straight.” (Proverbs 2. 5-6)

“Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. For forty days He was tempted by the Devil. He ate nothing during those days. At the end of those days He was hungry.” (Luke 4.1-2)

TODAY’S REFLECTION ON GOD’S WORD:

In the theme of “straight/strait” to the heart of the matter, I love Luke’s description of the what happened immediately after Jesus had been baptized [in spirit and in truth] by John in the Jordan River. It is a story of contrasts and challenges for today as much as it was for those who were witnesses to it in Jesus’ day.

Anyone who has stepped into a stream, lake or river in early Spring that is fed most directly by the melting of mountain snows probably shivers at the mere mention of it. That water is cold! At the headwaters, it is crystal clear and such a silvery blue that your eye cannot hardly stop looking at it. It speaks “cold.” Of course, as it flows down the mountainside through a myriad of cuts in the rock shaped by years and years of water erosion and into a river or lake, its color is more muddied. If other streams, rivers and tributaries empty into the lake the water is murky. You cannot fathom its depth mentally and dare not physically knowing that what is below the surface may be dangerous. This was the water of Lake Gennesaret, or the Sea of Galilee, in that season. Out of it flowed the Jordan River. In early spring it would be flood season and the waters would exceed the normal banks. It roiled and flowed with a speed that would easily carry debris, an animal or a person far down river to be found alive or dead as the case may be. Cold, muddy water was the baptismal font for Jesus and John. It was on the celebration of Jesus’ thirtieth birthday. This was the traditional graduation day for a rabbi. Not that they had finished their training but that they would enter into with due diligence. Not far away on the plains of Bethlehem, a child had been born thirty years previous. His parents had come from “upstream” in Nazareth to Bethlehem. They didn’t travel by riverboat but in a pilgrammage of humanity to their point of origin. For Mary and Joseph, Bethlehem was that point of origin. Their ancestors came from the land of Judah with Bethlehem as its seat of government. The fields portrayed a season of innocence with fields stretching from the heights of the mountains where Jerusalem was to the Negev and across the plains to Philistia. Those fields served two purposes: wheat and sheep. It is hard to get stirred up to chaos when watching a flock a sheep bleating nonchalantly as they graze. A shepherd’s whistle guides their shepherd dog into place with an occasional call to a fellow shepherd who tended the far-side of the flock. And if you have never seen a field of wheat waving in the sun being stroked by prairie breezes, you have missed a piece of heaven. There you can close your eyes and get caught in the swaying of the wheat, the teasing brushes of the leaves and stalks and the sense of a vast expanse with no reason to leave.

Where was He going? The time had come to depart from the “world” which He had experienced for thirty years. It had prepared Him for a new season of harvest. He now stepped into the troubled waters from the north and embraced the time of a new arrival. John declared it upon seeing his cousin stepping over the edge of a wadi to the west. The early morning sun caused His face to shine. John said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Jesus stepped through the crowd. While John’s declaration had been sounded, no finger was pointed. Everyone would have to come to recognize Jesus for who He was and is and is to be. Jesus moved into a muddy pool of quiet water which had been created by the rising river filling a normally dry gulley. Why would He who was without sin parts the waters of humanity and step in to be baptized. Was it purely for PR? Jesus said it was to fulfill “all righteousness.” Righteousness was not the sanctimonious behavior as exhibited by the detractors of John and Jesus. True righteousness was and is, using a term I learned yesterday, “preactive planning.” Preactive planning is the conceptualization of the future and then strategically planning to achieve or reach that future. There would be many who would approach Jesus with questions of the future, their future. James and John, Nicodemus, Jairus and the Rich Young Ruler are but a few. True righteousness is conceptualizing what the future would look like in God’s Kingdom in Heaven. For the nation of Israel, the promise of the coming Messiah was the conceptualizing of what the future would look like when God’s Kingdom in Heaven would be on earth. Jesus even prays for this as He taught His disciples to pray. The problem existed not in the vision of the future which any of them had. The challenge was the strategic planning and implementation of the ways and means of actualizing that future. And this is where “the rubber met the road.” More aptly, perhaps I should say “where the stone hits the water.” You know what I mean, right? Standing by a body of water that stretches out in front of you, the tendency is to find a flat stone and skip it across the water. The more it skips the better you feel. Those tap, tap, taps until it finally fades under the surface of the water is the ideal: like heaven. When our stone is bit off kilter, not flat enough or too heavy, there may be one skip or two and then “kerplunk.” We might as well have just thrown that boulder into water and see how big a splash we can make. Jesus is the rock of faith. Jesus is also the “stone” which the builders rejected. Why did they reject the stone as a suitable capstone? Why did they reject Jesus as Messiah and the Rabbi of True Righteousness? He didn’t skip across the water leaving tiny ripples and then quietly disappear. He dropped right in and stirred up the waters of life. That is, after all, a strategy of “clearing muddy water.” Splash the water. Move the dirt. Create a turbulence at the surface where the water of life rushes in more quickly than the silt. Scoop out a handful of water and drink. That is what Jesus meant and that is what Jesus did.

And that is what Luke must have “seen,” although he was not an eyewitness but an ear-witness of that moment in time when Jesus moved from Son of Man to Son of God. Jesus was intending to make a splash, clear the water and give all those who were thirsty and hungry their fill of the Kingdom of God on earth as it was, is and will always be in Heaven. As soon as Jesus was raised up out of the water, He went straight to the desert, the Wilderness of Sin. No, not the same as Moses and the Hebrew freed-slaves which was much further to the south. This was the Moses, Elijah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David revisited. This was the Law of Righteousness come down from Heaven engraved not on tablets but on hearts. He intention was to stake claim to the battle and the battlefield He intended to conquer and deliver His people from their demonic captor and from his armory of sin. In Luke, we can see Jesus crossing over and entering into the domain of Israel’s past where the scapegoats had been launched into the “sea of forgetfulness.” It was the Middle Eastern spiritual “devil’s triangle.” The enemy came at Him full force without fear of failure. Three attacks across the bow of the battleship Jesus. Three volleys in return which did not skip gently across the water to sink beneath the surface and leave no impact. Three volleys which hit their mark directly, squarely and with such impact, the enemy retreated. Three assertions of strategic planning and implementation which were offered and then the rest of the forty days were spent in living the assertions out. He did not eat. He may not have even had water to drink. He fasted and feasted on the very Word of God that was His identity and His sustenance. Yes, in the end, He hungered and thirst. But what He truly hungered and thirsted for was righteousness. It was not bread, authority or death-defying (and God tempting) identity. And where did He immediately go? Back to Galilee and to the synagogues preaching, teaching, healing, building communities of faith and modelling for them what Messiah’s Kingdom was all about. He exhibited true leadership “saying what He would do, doing what He said and showing others how to do the same as He who is the way, the truth and the life.”

TODAY’S PRAYER IN LIGHT OF GOD’S WORD:

Father, You have revealed to us best in Jesus the Christ. By Him and Him alone shall we gain the eternal life and our place in eternal rest, living for You always. Show us more and by Your Holy Spirit instruct us in the way we should go, the truth we should reveal and the life we shall live with you forever. In Jesus’ name, we pray. AMEN.