Breaking the Curse of Comfort in a Post-Christian Society
M. JOHNSON
BLESSED
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Printed in the United States of America First Edition 2019
For Tomoe Dunning who has blessed so many of us.
No more let sin and sorrow grow Nor thorns infest the ground: He comes to make his blessings flow Far as the curse is found, Far as the curse is found, Far as, far as the curse is found.
Joy to the World, Isaac Watts, 1719
INTRO
the story of blessing from eden to acts
Scripture Reading
Genesis 1 + 2
I have a confession to make. I love the dollar store.
Yes, I am fully aware the toys will break before nightfall. Yes, I have misgivings about the ethical integrity of the merchandise. Yes, I feel a little heartbroken for authors whose books are laid to rest next to the bouncy balls. And yet, I still go.
On one particular shopping trip I was caught off-guard by an otherwise nondescript coffee mug sitting between made-to-break spatulas and non-microwavable dishware. A single strand of script was scrawled across the middle, blessed. I stared at this mug for much too long repeating the word over and over in my mind.
Blessed.
The word seemed out of place in a store known for its hokey cereal brands and orange-tinted plastic dolls. A quick survey of any dollar store and you’ll come to the same conclusion: not a single thing is authentic. Everything is a knock off. The dollar store is proof that we don’t mind the counterfeit as long as it costs us less.
Seeing the Christianized term “blessed” emblazoned on a mug in a dollar store perhaps should have made me exclaim, “Hey kids, come look at this! It’s evidence that the world is hungry for God’s blessing!” But instead, it felt like something else—something eerily familiar. It forced me to reckon with the truth that I often settle for a lukewarm mug of “blessing” when an ocean of intimacy with God is hidden in the costly and inconvenient places I’m most likely to avoid.
MILK + HONEY
When life gets tough and I doubt God’s goodness? Back to the dollar store of counterfeit comforts I go.
I would venture to say that I’m not alone. A lot of us are comfortable using the word blessed in whatever context we see fit because, well, we are comfortable.
God was using that dollar store mug to remind me of the times I had been tempted to accuse him of prescribing me unnecessary pain while demanding blessing on my terms. I paid my dollar God, where is my blessing? Ultimately, I realized that in one way or another all of us are selling the story of God’s blessing much too short.
If you are new to faith, or still exploring the story of who Jesus is, one of things that makes Christianity utterly unique among belief systems is its radical understanding of blessing. We don’t earn it. We can’t perform our way into it. It’s not reserved for the powerful, the popular, or the polished. It doesn’t trend on social media, win awards, or show up in curated highlight reels. God’s blessing isn’t locked behind a secret code or reserved for the especially enlightened. It isn’t gendered, gated, or granted only to those who sit quietly in the front row of religious behavior.
In Christ, blessing is freely given—not as a prize for perfection, but as a gift of grace to the undeserving.
The only non-negotiable requirement of biblical blessing is that it is for those who believe and confess with their mouths that Jesus Christ is Lord (Rom. 10:9).
Blessing in the Christian faith is synonymous with God’s presence. It is not a level we achieve or a title we are given, it is an intimate relationship we learn how to receive and be shaped by. Blessing for the believer, in the dollar store sense, is a disembodied, somewhere-out-there kind of belief in God—a belief built upon consuming and accumulating as the pathway to the blessed life. As a rule of thumb when it comes to determining God’s blessing in your life, counting followers, dollars, or square footage always falls short to the eternal blessing of knowing Christ.
In the Christian faith tradition, blessing is an ever-present Person, a God who is love that holds your hand while you’re walking through the valley of the shadow of death or soaring on the heights of a long awaited dream. Blessing isn’t a reward for asking God into your heart, it’s an outpouring of allowing God to shepherd, pour into, heal, help, and hold your heart day in and day out—particularly in the hard and disorienting times.
What I’ve come to realize is that blessing is often confronted by the curse of comfort. We are in a unique time of history in which comfort has become an acceptable idol. In a sentence, the curse of comfort is an unfounded expectation of ease that creates the illusion of control. In simple terms, comfort, as an idol, has become the metric by which we subconsciously measure God’s blessing in
Author’s intent: To rediscover the meaning of blessing the way God intended us to understand it.
NEW TERMS
Hermeneutics - n. — The discipline of how to correctly determine meaning in a biblical text.1
Post-Christian society - n — A cultural norm that draws upon the blessed foundation of the JudeoChristian faith without the belief required to truly experience blessing.
The Curse of Comfort - n. — An unfounded expectation of ease that becomes an illusion of control.
Redemptive History - n. — The complete collection of books in the Bible that collectively culminate in the life of Jesus.
Exegesis - v. — “Critical explanation or interpretation of a text,” in this case, scripture.2
PUT IT IN THE BANK
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.”
2 CORINTHIANS 1:3-5 (esv)
our lives—and as a result, pain and discomfort have been categorized as signs of His absence rather than His all-consuming presence.
Ironically, this illusion of control is often shattered by the smallest shift in circumstances. The truth is, God never intended for our circumstances to be the barometer of His blessing. “In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Instead, he intended for us to live truly free and blessed—experiencing His kingdom reality even in the midst of a fallen one.
At the heart of the curse of comfort is this: many of us are happy to call ourselves Christians—as long as the price is right. We’re willing to do the right thing only if it pays dividends to our personal “blessing” account. I know “the curse of comfort” may sound heavy for a Bible study on blessing, but comfort is often the shadow side—the counterfeit—of God’s desire to bless us fully.
This study will invite us to climb out on the limb of self-appointed control and find the courage to let go—once and for all.
But before we dive in, let’s ask: What exactly does God offer us? Is it really worth trusting him when life feels anything but blessed—and we’re tempted to reach for quick fixes from the counterfeit comforts aisle: familiar numbing agents, distractions, compulsions, and consumptions?
Well, let’s see. Psalm 36:7–9 (nlt) says:
How precious is your unfailing love, O God!
All humanity finds shelter in the shadow of your wings. You feed them from the abundance of your own house, letting them drink from your river of delights.
For you are the fountain of life, the light by which we see.
And 2 Corinthians 9:10–11 (The Message) explains:
This most generous God who gives seed to the farmer that becomes bread for your meals is more than extravagant with you. He gives you something you can then give away, which grows into fully-formed lives, robust in God, wealthy in every way, so that you can be generous in every way, producing with us great praise to God.
God’s blessing isn’t about ease or comfort—it’s about abundant life that flows through us, creating deep connections with others and deeper awareness within ourselves. A Cistercian monk named St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) beautifully described the flow of a blessed life:
“The man who is wise, therefore, will see his life as more like a reservoir than a canal. The canal simultaneously pours out what it receives; the reservoir retains the water till it is filled, then discharges the overflow without loss to itself.”
This kind of blessed life makes us whole and generous in ways that honor God and enrich our enjoyment of life now and in the one to come. In contrast, the Western world reduces blessing to bottom lines and instant gratification. The vision culture hands us is of blessings that run dry the moment the source of the blessing we’ve bought dries up. But God has a far more expansive vision for blessing—one that makes your very life a blessing in every imaginable way, not only for you but for those around you.
The cultural tension we must navigate as followers of Jesus in a dollar-store reality is the constant bombardment of counterfeit blessings everywhere we look. These blessings appear desirable on the shelf—but once we take them home, we discover they’re disconnected from God’s gracious, unfailing love and deeply rooted in idolatry or self-worship. Each attractive lure offers the illusion of Christian blessing, but without the cost of Christ.
Cultural commentators believe this is an outcome of existing in a post-Christian society. Mark Sayers, an Australian author and leader at Red Church in Melbourne, explains our unique time in history this way:
Post-Christianity is not pre-Christianity; rather post-Christianity attempts to move beyond Christianity...Post-Christian culture attempts to retain the solace of the faith, whilst gutting it of the costs, commitments, and restraints that the gospel places upon the individual will. Post-Christianity intuitively yearns for the justice and shalom of the kingdom, whilst defending the reign of the individual will.3
For me, post-Christian ideals show up in all kinds of ways. Namely, calling myself a Christian but wanting to skirt the costs of it. Holding tight to my time and money and labeling it stewardship. Feeling poor in the wealthiest country on earth and reorganizing life to chase more. Avoiding hard things and calling it God’s protection, when really, I’m just protecting myself. These admissions are the costly sacrifice of discipleship—naming where we’ve settled for comfort instead of Christ.
However it shows up in our lives, the curse of comfort leaves no space for the true blessing of God or the surrender required to receive it. As followers of Jesus, we must resist becoming like the fearful servant who buried his talents, only to be rebuked for clinging to a faith that was cautious, self-preserving, and risk-free.
When Jesus tells the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25, he describes a servant who opts out of the risk and responsibility of the blessed life:
“I was afraid I would lose your money, so I hid it in the earth. Look, here is your money back.”
MATTHEW 25:25, NLT
To this, the Master replies:
“You wicked and lazy servant! ... To those who use well what they are given,
even more will be given, and they will have an abundance. But from those who do nothing, even what little they have will be taken away.”
MATTHEW 25:26, 29, nlt
Jesus is not always safe. His words don’t come with a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down. He speaks plainly—sometimes uncomfortably so. The issue isn’t that His message is unclear; it’s that we often don’t like what he says.
My favorite quote in The Chronicles of Narnia is when Susan voices concern about the safety of Aslan the lion, who is symbolic of Jesus:
“Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.”
To which Mr. Beaver replies:
“Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
This good King gets to be the one who defines blessing for us; we don’t get to dictate terms. And honestly, we lose out on an authentic faith when we do.
The truth of the matter is that all of us have used the word blessed to describe a happy ending, a wild success, an exotic vacation or a healthy birth. And that isn’t a false interpretation, it’s just an incomplete one. When we reduce God’s blessing to a hashtag or a high note, we omit the unexpected joy that comes in accepting Jesus’ call to an inconvenienced life.
It is not a sin to wrestle with uncertainty when we find ourselves feeling less than blessed, but we border dangerous territory when we choose to audit the viability of God’s love by consulting the oracle of comfort.
When we look at what scripture has to say, we find that comfort only makes sense in the context of affliction:
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.”
2 COR. 1:3–5, EMPHASIS MINE
In God’s economy, comfort is meant to be a shared experience, not an individual pursuit. But in our post-Christian society (what Mark Sayers describes), we’ve been conditioned to believe that being fully human in close relationship with others costs too much. So we isolate, mask up, draw hard boundaries, shut ourselves in, and risk nothing.
WHEN WE REDUCE GOD’S BLESSING TO A HASHTAG OR A HIGH NOTE, WE OMIT THE UNEXPECTED JOY THAT COMES IN ACCEPTING JESUS’ CALL TO AN INCONVENIENCED LIFE.
Many Christians have bought into the myth of the lone ranger, the self-made soul who pulls themselves up by their own bootstraps and doesn’t need anyone else to become who they want to be.
But in the Bible, we see the church, in all its forms and expressions, as the very means through which God chooses to comfort His people, bless them, and dwell among them, imperfections and all (Colossians 3:12–17).
When comfort becomes our community, she slowly reveals herself as an isolating, numbing, fragile, self-critical, and life-sucking substitute. Oh, and she’s lousy at board games.
If we don’t learn to embrace life’s storms, or, as one of my mentors, Dane Sanders, puts it, “resist the drift” toward compulsive comforts, we risk creating a logjam in the river of our soul.
We might think comfort and control are helpful defenses in keeping bad things out, but what we often fail to see is that they also shut us off from the wonder of God and the beauty that is to be found in the unexpected places.
CUP O’ CONTEXT
Wonder is the outcome of a blessed life. Our biblical brothers and sisters experienced the wonder of God despite personal failure and affliction. They experienced wonder in the very places you would expect despair and disillusionment. This should make any of us who are eager to experience the true reality of God’s blessing begin to question the cultural definition of where blessing is advertised to exist.
If we are brave enough to scratch deeper than the surface of life, we may find that the dollar-store version of blessing shrivels and dies as soon as it is tested by affliction. But in God’s kingdom? The blessed life miraculously springs up from the dry, desolate places.
Adam and Eve found they were still blessed after the fall because God provided for them and remained present even as they left the garden (Gen. 3:21–24; 4:1). Noah discovered blessing in the midst of humanity’s destruction, as God protected him and his family through the floodwaters (Gen. 7:1-16). Abraham found he was blessed despite his initial doubts about having a son, because God fulfilled His promise in His perfect timing (Gen. 21:1–3). Moses experienced blessing even from outside the Promised Land because God remained with him and led His people (Deut. 32:48–52). David realized he was still blessed after his sin with Bathsheba because God forgave him and did not abandon him, despite his abysmal failures (2 Sam. 12:13).
Stories like these should make us uncomfortable, not only because they reveal losses of wholeness, civilization, hope, and innocence (all of which happened), but because they show how, despite humanity’s rebellion and self-worship, God’s
persistent love and commitment to bless His children could not be stopped. Here’s the good news for you: you aren’t the exception.
The Blessed life in Christ isn’t a blue ribbon awarded to the best in show; it’s a gut-wrenching gift that twists in the stomachs of both the self-righteous and the sinners, urging us to consider the boundlessness of His goodness to the not-sogood in all of us.
Blessing is a total blunder, if not for the goodness of God.
I’ve found it very difficult to tell others I’m living the blessed life with a sparkly, selfassured smile. This may be because I’m still painfully aware, and often appalled, by my own messy reality. It is through shaky tears of gratitude that the blessed life reaches its crescendo in my own life.
It is through the broken shards of our false selves and the hopeless half-truths we flirt with that God’s blessing rises and buoys us. Much like the first generation of Israelites after the exodus from Egypt, the church as we know it today is wandering in a materialistic wasteland thousands of years later, hungering for the good life we’ve already been given. We’ve forgotten our years of slavery and oppression: and we’ve re-developed a taste for the very “blessing” that enslaved our spiritual ancestors.
Without a doubt, God has invited me—again and again—to drop the teacup (or the dollar-store “blessed” mug) and let it shatter. I’m most often reminded of this when I’m invited once more into the privilege of witnessing someone experience the gift of grace in Jesus for the very first time. The pleasure of God’s nearness is palpable for the new believer. They can barely speak about the beauty of a life with God, caught up in the overwhelming blessing of it all.
A very close friend of mine often jokes that if he just rides my coattails, he’s sure he’ll get into heaven. He likes to announce, “I’ll just tell them I’m with you when I get there.” To which I usually reply, “Honestly, if I know my God, I think telling them I’m with you might be the reason I get in.” All joking aside, we know our efforts don’t earn us tickets to paradise. But my friend is so familiar with his own brokenness that the blessed life of God’s nearness and presence still flabbergasts him.
As someone who has had the ridiculous grace of walking with Jesus since I was a little girl, I refuse to buy into the public relations version of myself—the one that shows up on stages and in churches, the one people assume has somehow “arrived” in her faith. I am not who I once was, praise Jesus, but I’ll never forget the lost and lonely girl who shaped so many years of my identity. Especially when she still shows up unexpectedly, just as I start to believe I’ve outgrown my need for grace. This may be one of the reasons the blessing of Jesus’ grace still tastes so sweet to me.
What about you? Does the grace of God still taste sweet?
A BIG PART OF FOLLOWING JESUS IS LEARNING TO REPLACE OUR CRAVINGS FOR THE CURSE OF COMFORT—WITH THE BLESSING OF OBEDIENCE.
Have you tasted it at all?
It might seem odd that a dollar-store mug was what brought me back to reality, but I pray this study will be like a strong cup of black coffee for your sleepy soul as well. Because after I left that store—years ago now—the eyes of my heart were widened: Has “blessed” become just a punchline for the privileged and the pious? Is it impossible to be blessed when life feels uncomfortable? When we are stuck in destructive patterns? When we are stranded in the story we never wanted?
Biblically, we see that the only way to be blessed in this life is to know God. To seek His face. To encounter him in our everyday, every day.
Brennan Manning explains this beautifully:
All that is good is ours, not by right, but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God. While there is much we may have earned—our degree and our salary, our home and garden...a good night’s sleep—all this is possible only because we have been given so much: life itself; eyes to see and hands to touch, a mind to shape ideas, and a heart to beat with love. We have been given God in our souls and Christ in our flesh. We have the power to believe where others deny, to hope where others despair, to love where others hurt. This and so much more is sheer gift; It is not reward for our faithfulness, our generous disposition, or our heroic life of prayer. Even our fidelity is a gift. “If we but turn to God,”’ said St. Augustine, “that itself is a gift of God.”4
A big part of following Jesus is learning to replace our cravings for the curse of comfort—with the blessing of obedience. In religious settings, obedience is often seen as the act of following strict rules or succumbing to behavior control. But as my spiritual director Colleen explained, the Greek word for obedience is hypakoē, which means “to listen under” or “to hear attentively.” It’s less about what we do and more about how we listen.
True spiritual attunement means hearing God’s voice and, more importantly, believing that the greatest blessing on this side of heaven is that he actually wants to speak to you—and has been doing so your whole life, even if you haven’t been paying attention.
BLESS THE NUTS + BOLTS
The good news is that our self-first society makes the message of Jesus radically relevant.
His life preaches a gospel of dying to self. As Christians living in a nation hurriedly rushing past the cross, let’s post up in the shadow of Calvary and commit to finding blessing there. In that commitment, we need to do our homework. To fully understand why God blesses humans and His purposes for doing so, we need to trace the gospel storyline from the very beginning. God’s very first order of business after breathing life into the dirt of the human soul was to bless. And in fact, we had a blessed nature before we had a human nature (Genesis 1:27–28).
Although God’s original blessing was pure and perfect, humans quickly corrupted it with the curse of sin. But that didn’t stop God from making sure we could still access our original design as “blessable image bearers,” as my beloved seminary professor, Gerry Breshears, describes.
When blessing collided with the serpent of self-will, God introduced an antidote to shame through the serum of grace. He established love-soaked covenants—His binding promises—to pour out His presence on His chosen people, generation after generation, as they awaited the fulfillment of His promises in the Messiah. When Jesus, the long-awaited Messiah, came, died, and rose again, God’s final gift was the Holy Spirit—the Helper—so he could dwell with us always.
Blessing has its own rich storyline woven throughout Scripture. If we want to reclaim the biblical birthright breathed into us by God Himself, we need to trace that narrative thoughtfully. If you’re newer to studying the Bible, this journey may feel fast-paced and will cover broad stretches of biblical history. Don’t worry about grasping every detail—stay focused on the bigger picture. And whenever it feels overwhelming, come back to this simple prayer:
Father in heaven, You have made me to receive Your blessing in all its fullness. Even if I don’t fully understand who You are or how this all works, give me wisdom beyond my ability and joy beyond my capacity. May these words not just be information, but seeds of truth that take root and produce something beautiful and freeing in me for years to come. Amen.
As for our time together, here is a road map for how we will traverse the terrain of biblical blessing together. We will study what it means to be blessed by peering into a variety of biblical genres like: narrative, law, poetry, wisdom literature, and parables.
To do this well, we have a lot of ground to cover:
CHAPTERS 1–3: THE HISTORY OF BLESSING
Focus Books | Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy
Genre | Narrative + Law
We will study significant parts of the first few books of the Old Testament that pertain to God’s purpose for creating and bestowing blessings on the chosen people of Israel and what that means for us.
CHAPTERS 4: THE BEAUTY + BRAINS OF BLESSING
Focus | Job, Psalms and Proverbs
Genre | Wisdom + Poetry
We will feast on wisdom literature and poetry to understand the role God intended health, wealth, and happiness to play in the blessed identity of his kids.
IF WE WANT TO RECLAIM THE BIBLICAL BIRTHRIGHT BREATHED INTO US BY GOD HIMSELF, WE NEED TO TRACE THAT NARRATIVE THOUGHTFULLY.
IN-BETWEEN BLESSINGS
Focus | Solomonic Psalm
Genre | Wisdom + Poetry + Prophecy
We will study Psalm 72 in bite-sized chunks over the course of several days as a literal placeholder for the intertestamental period between the Old and New Testaments. This Psalm was written by the world’s wisest man to reveal God’s prophetic vision for blessing the nation of Israel and, in effect, the entire world.
CHAPTERS 5–7: THE WORKS OF BLESSING
Focus Books | Synoptic Gospels + Acts
Genre | Parables + Historical Biography + New Testament Narrative
We will spend time linking Old Testament truths pertinent to blessing with New Testament revelation about what it means to be blessed this side of the cross. We will then wrap up by studying early church practices to activate God’s blessing to its fullest.
REVERSE THE CURSE
Let me stop for a moment to encourage you.
We live in a time that is incredibly exciting for the church in the West. There is a passing away of an old model and an opportunity for the emergence of a new one— one that is committed to looking, breathing, acting, and loving like Jesus. I have the privilege of being surrounded and inspired on a daily basis by compassionate and passionate people who are willing to risk comfort for the call of Christ. My heart burns with joy at the thought of what is to come for us.
If you are doing this study, I firmly believe God is inviting you to partner with what he is up to in the world. He is calling you up. Ask the Holy Spirit to be your compass as we begin to identify areas of dissatisfaction in our lives so we can definitively dispel the false gospel of cheap comfort. We are going to challenge our post-Christian worldview by rightfully reframing all we’ve been given through the lens of Jesus and his new kingdom era of abundance.
It is my prayer that we are set free from the confines of cultural comfort and its ensuing chaos though the power of God’s word. Trusting him will be the key that unshackles us from an apathetic and infiltrated faith. I believe eating and drinking God’s blessing will subdue our souls into a secure place of unprecedented peace and unparalleled prosperity. When we are rooted in the right understanding of God’s original intent for our good, we can then experience abundance like we’ve never known.
Buckle up buttercup! To be biblically blessed gets a little bumpy at times but it’s the most valuable investment you’ll ever make.
We’re in this together, M. Johnson
BREAKOUT
Culture says: You deserve the good life Scripture says: You have the good life
Isaiah 61:1–4
Make a list of all the things that the Lord’s favor provides from this section of prophetic scripture.
Flip over to Luke 4:16–21. What things has Jesus fulfilled from this section of Isaiah?
READ Why do you think Jesus stopped at “year of favor” and didn’t include “the day of vengeance of our God”? What do you think the day of vengeance refers to?
SPEAK
Read aloud 1 Peter 2:6–10
What does the belief in Jesus free us from? (See verse 6)
What good gift does a believer have access to now that we are a people through Jesus? (See verse 10)
RISK
Meditate on John 3:16–18
Have you ever been angry or disenchanted with Jesus because your finances, marriage, relationships, job, or dreams were not panning out the way you imagined they would? Have you ever wondered if it was because of God’s judgement against you? What do you think “not condemned” means?
Before we dive into this study write a few sentences about what you think it means to be “blessed”.
CHAPTER 1
willy wonka + the blessing factory
When the character Willy Wonka is first introduced in the 1971 film production of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the camera focuses on a door that mysteriously swings open to reveal no one inside. A few moments later, a man clad in an ostentatious purple suit appears leaning heavily on a cane and maneuvering a flight of stairs with deliberate effort.
What happens next is a feat in cinematography. The lens follows Willy Wonka for a minute and a half as he hobbles down a red carpet, greeting the crowds clamoring for their chance to win a lifetime supply of chocolate.
As time drags on, the cheering ceases, the excitement stalls, and no one is quite sure that Willy Wonka is as great as they thought he was. The only sound they hear is the dull echo of Willy Wonka’s cane and his foot as it drags behind him.
A candy maker with a considerable limp and an agonizingly slow pace? This is not what they were expecting. Once Wonka finally makes his way to the gate, he dramatically freezes, lets go of his cane, and falls into a somersault before leaping into a jump of great joy. The crowd goes wild!
In a way, this scene explains the ultimate purpose of blessing in the redemptive history of the Bible.
When God created the world, he dramatically swung open the door to human life and positioned himself as a powerful Creator who made all things good for our good. When humankind fell for the fall, we were deeply wounded. Fatally, in fact.
Out of love for our hopeless condition, God chose to lean on the cane of compassion and walk his chosen children through wilderness after wilderness. And now, we wait—trusting in his loving kindness to return us to a new Eden for eternity. Until then, God perpetually slows his pace to patiently endure the long minutes of disappointment, confusion, and silence we experience when we begin to doubt who he is and forget who we are.
Ultimately, Jesus will return, the cane will be dropped, and a world will be reestablished without the crippling effects of sin. At that time, compassion will become a relic of folklore in a world where every tear is wiped away. And the crowd will go wild!
As far as I know, that day is not today.
That is why it is vitally important that we understand where we are in the historical context of God’s redemptive story. Jesus has made an everlasting reality possible for us through his death and resurrection, but we are still in the long, hobbling moments of the human experience. We are not defenseless against the doubt that threatens to make little of God and much of our struggle. Instead, we are armed with two very important realities:
1. We are created in the image of God.
2. Blessing isn’t just a gift, it’s the framework for human functionality.5
MORE THAN LOOK ALIKES
We read in Genesis 1:1 that “God created the heavens and the earth.” The Hebrew word for “created” is bara’, which means “to bring into existence.”6 God chose to create a space for humanity to thrive.
In contrast, other ancient creation narratives present very different motivations for the divine act of world making. In the Enuma Elish—the creation story of the ancient Babylonian empire—the god Marduk creates humans to serve the gods and relieve them of labor; in essence, humans were created to be slaves. In Greek mythology, humans are an afterthought. The central drama revolves around the power struggles among the gods and their exploitation of humans to gain even more power.
Christianity, by contrast, is the only storyline that centers on the flourishing of human life, grounded in a God who desires relationship and purpose for His creation.
This means that God’s plans in Eden did not fail because we did.
I have found it common among some Christians to perpetuate the belief that we ruined God’s world and someday, he will watch all of this burn with a smile on his face. I do not share that belief nor do I find it consistent with Scripture (Isaiah 65:17, Acts 3:21, 2 Peter 3:13, Revelation 21:1–5). While sin carries natural
GOD CHOSE TO CREATE A SPACE FOR US TO THRIVE.
FOCUS BOOK: GENESIS
Context: Old Testament, Torah Genre: Historical Narrative
Original audience: The Jewish people
Author’s intent: To set the stage for the story of redemption by tracing Israel’s journey to Egypt.
NEW STUFF
Narrative Genre: This literary style makes up 60 percent of the bible.2
Narrative Purpose: Historical narrative is the “re-presentation of past events for the purpose of instruction.” The purpose of the biblical narrative is not simply to tell us what happened, but to relate it to biblical faith in the overall context of redemptive history.3
Chiasm - n. — A rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order.4
Blessed - (barak) v. — To invoke (or enact) divine favor, often implying a positive disposition or kind actions toward the recipient.1
Created - (bara’) v. — to bring into existence.
Formed - (yatsar) v. — to create (as an entity).
Fashioned - (banah) v. — to make or cause to be or to become.
PUT IT IN THE BANK
And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”
GENESIS 1:27-28
consequences and suffering remains a reality, God’s motivation for every human life is to cultivate thriving, not to annihilate it. Our failure in Eden or our failure one minute ago, does not outweigh God’s love for us and the plans he has for restoring what has been broken in this world and the next (Isaiah 65).
We hear echoes of the creation account in verses like John 15:16 and 1 John 4:19: “You did not choose me, but I chose you…” and “We love because he first loved us.”
God, in love, chose to make a beautiful, blessed world for you and me. In that way, God is like the wacky chocolatier who wanted to share his amazing candy creations with deeply flawed ticket winners. But unlike the human version of the story where one impoverished kid got his ultimate dream job, God intends to give all of us something a billion times better: himself.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
GENESIS 1:27
While it may seem like this verse unnecessarily repeats itself, nothing in the Bible is unintentional. In this verse we are introduced to a unique literary device known as a chiasm. Its very purpose is to draw the reader’s eye to the most important thing.7 The core message is we are image bearers of God.
For the original hearers of this chiasm (Jewish people learning about their ancestors), it would have been quite the audacious claim. Since we don’t live in a royal family in the ancient Near East, the idea of sharing in God’s image seems metaphorical at best. But what is essentially happening here is a tribal coronation of sorts.
God’s chosen people are being crowned. One commentator explained that, “Mankind is [being] appointed as God’s royal representatives, to rule the earth in his place.”8 If the curse of comfort tries to convince us that blessing comes from controlling our image and self-managing our life, then God’s blessing says the opposite. Instead of clinging to control, God actually shared His image with us—he co-signed it over, trusting us to reflect him in the world.
As a mom of three kids, I’ve learned that sharing doesn’t come naturally to any child. I have to teach them about its value. And yet, God’s first sharing lesson to humanity required nothing from us but acceptance. There was no defiant “mine!” from the mouth of God—only a loving, “ours.” A prideful god who only cared about his own autonomy would never dream of letting imperfect people share in his perfection.
If God were cruel, careless, or unkind, he would have created drones like Marduk did—or used us as pawns in a cosmic power play like Zeus or Apollo. But the God of the Bible didn’t create machines to follow His rules. He created human beings to share in His blessing.
WE ARE NOT MERELY CREATED OR CARED FOR LIKE THE REST OF CREATION— WE ARE CALLED, COMMISSIONED, AND CROWNED.
To underscore the contrast, we return again to the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation myth, which reveals the god Marduk refusing to rest on the seventh day. While the two accounts share some structural similarities, the differences are profound. Marduk remains on his throne, unwilling to show weakness by “resting”.9 Yahweh, by contrast, rests as an act of celebration for His creation work, modeling a rhythm of life intended for human flourishing. Scholars of ancient texts affirm: these are not the same story.
The God of the Bible isn’t preoccupied with ego or image. His concern is creating a framework in which his beloved children can flourish within the blessings of the world he made, shaped by the very character and love he shares with us (Exodus 34:6–7). Two of the distinct ways he accomplishes this are by weaving in rhythms of rest and inviting us into a curious little word: dominion.
“And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”
GENESIS 1:28
The Hebrew word for “blessed” here is barak, meaning to enact divine favor— often expressing kind and generous action toward another.10 God bestowed barak on humanity before we earned anything, then gave us dominion (radah) authority to rule. But this rule wasn’t meant to be tyrannical; it was a call to steward the earth in a way that reflects His character, compassion, and kindness. As blessable image-bearers, we are charged to get our hands dirty in the resources He has provided, joining him in putting the world back together—one simple act of obedience at a time.
If we look back a few verses, we see that the first mention of blessing is directed toward animal life (Gen. 1:22). But when humans are created, something fundamentally different happens: our blessing is relational. We are made in God’s image and entrusted with stewardship over the earth (Gen. 1:27; Ps. 8:6–8). By contrast, theories such as naturalism and evolutionary humanism, as introduced by Charles Darwin, make no spiritual distinction between humans and animals. Instead, they view humanity simply as matter arranged along a continuum of development—more evolved, perhaps, but not more blessed. This perspective denies the dignity, purpose, and inheritance that God designed for His children. This is not the same story.
You see, the Bible tells a better story. We are not merely created or cared for like the rest of creation—we are called, commissioned, and crowned.
“You have made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet.”
PSALM 8:6
“You have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.”
REVELATION 5:10
“For those blessed [barak] by the Lord shall inherit the land…”
PSALM 37:22
God’s blessing is both identity and invitation.
You were created not only to receive his favor, but to actively participate in his Kingdom—right now, and into eternity.
And here’s an important distinction: when God made humanity, he didn’t just speak us into existence—he formed us from the dust (Gen. 2:7). That word formed carries the weight of craftsmanship. It evokes an artisan at work—careful, intentional, and hands-on.11 We weren’t mass-produced; we were hand-shaped by the Master Artist Himself.
Which means that according to the biblical narrative, we’re not just made of matter—like Darwin suggested—we’re a kind of matter that matters deeply to God. So much so that he placed His very own breath within us using the most basic substance imaginable: dust (Gen. 2:7).
THE WORLD’S WORST BUSINESSMAN
Even at this early point in our study on blessing—from Eden to Acts—we’re armed with three foundational theological truths about biblical blessing:
1. God’s blessing is identity, not reward.
2. Humanity is crowned with divine purpose.
3. We were created by a compassionate, relational God
Which means we can confidently say that Willy Wonka is a hack at giving good gifts compared to the God of the Bible. A lifetime of chocolate can’t hold a candle to a lifetime of God’s blessing. And yet, if we’re honest, we want the chocolate and God knows it. This is the big lie that the curse of comfort tempts us with: that God is withholding good things from us, so we must take them for ourselves.
However, the good news for misguided hearts like ours is that God isn’t afraid to take risks when it comes to our deepest longings. He’s willing to let us chase satisfaction in all the wrong places for a time, because, in a surprising twist of providential care, even our misguided cravings can lead us back to him when they inevitably fall short.
In the biblical story, and in our lived kingdom reality, God is a bold, high-stakes investor who goes all in on our hearts. He knows that a lifetime supply of chocolate won’t satisfy the soul. Our deep longing for more—what I call holy desire—isn’t a sinful trap, but part of what it means to be human. When we entrust those desires, whatever they may be, to a generous God who delights in giving good gifts, we uncover vast, hidden blessings shaped by him and found in him. It is through these holy desires that we are led into the abundant life he always intended, far beyond the illusion of what we think we’re missing.
WHEN WE REDUCE GOD’S BLESSING TO A HASHTAG OR A HIGH NOTE, WE OMIT THE UNEXPECTED JOY THAT COMES IN ACCEPTING JESUS’ CALL TO AN INCONVENIENCED LIFE.
This deep longing to be blessed by our Father isn’t a flaw or failure; it’s the engine that drives our actions and shapes our spirituality. But often, because we’re so afraid of disappointment, we dilute our deepest desires to fit into a fragile, dollar-store mug and then wonder why God doesn’t seem as good as we hoped. What if our modest, censored, “I-don’t-mean-to-bother-you” expectations actually offend a God whose love is wild, relentless, and all-consuming?
Catholic priest and theologian Ronald Rohleiser writes of this God-given need for blessing in his book The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality.
“Whatever the expression, everyone is ultimately talking about the same thing–an unquenchable fire, a restlessness, a longing, a disquiet, a hunger, a loneliness, a gnawing nostalgia…a wildness that can not be tamed, a congenital all–embracing ache that lies at the center of the human experience and is the ultimate force that drives everything else. Desire gives no exemptions…it can show itself as aching pain or delicious hope. Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with that desire. What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us.”13
We’re all on a journey marked by both pain and hope. In this study, we’ll pay close attention to the story arc where God involves himself: in the pattern of places, promises, and subplots that shape the biblical storyline of blessing. In Genesis 2:10–14, we see God’s intention for blessing was not just for our spiritual abundance, but for our material abundance as well.
A river flows out of Eden to water the garden and from there divides into four rivers. The first is named Pishon; it flows through Havilah where there is gold. The gold of this land is good. The land is also known for a sweet-scented resin and the onyx stone. The second river is named Gihon; it flows through the land of Cush. The third river is named Hiddekel and flows east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates (msg).
The land described in these verses is a paradise fed by four flowing rivers and filled with gold, onyx, and precious stones. This place basically grows profitable proceeds from the ground. Commentators suggest that this reflects harmony between natural beauty and divine provision, pointing to the sacredness of physical creation, not just the spiritual. Creation was “very good” indeed.
One commentator called the description of this land “a motif of resplendence,” but anyone can conclude it was simply breathtaking. While words fail to capture God’s first draft of material magnificence, I imagine it was like Fiji with gold-plated pineapples punctuated by pee-your-pants joy. But I could be wrong.
Since we don’t know for sure, we have to simply accept that God’s first impulse towards us was to hand-stitch abundance into the very fiber of our existence, both in our physical being and physical environment. He wanted us to experience a deluge of delight from the inside out. God wanted our lives to take place in a space epically grand and gorgeously beyond compare.
This should tip you off to a core truth: God doesn’t want your stuff. It was His to begin with. God made the perfect home for us, and if that wasn’t enough, he also gave us the perfect job: “to fill the earth and subdue it” and “to work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15, 1:28).
He gave humankind low-threshold joys—holding hands, making art, riding horses, feeding ducks, kissing kittens, and fighting chaos with creativity. He encouraged His creation to listen to birdsong, name things, and write poetry laced with worship and wonder. He invited the human heart to organize, calculate, and investigate. Eden was made for adventurous exploring—mountain scaling, ravine trekking, river fording— while pausing to eat ripe mangoes, crunch on celery, and slurp on watermelon. All I have is yours
Yet over the millennia—since Paradise Lost, as Milton called it—humanity has tried to improve upon, draw inspiration from, and recreate a new and better version of God’s marvelous creation. We’ve chased the high interest rates of autonomy, building lives held together by the glue of gumption and the stitches of self.
In the biblical narrative, this pattern repeats itself: from the Tower of Babel to Egypt to every place where “empire” is orchestrated—the quest for blessing on our own terms takes root.14 Whatever the name, it’s in those places that, if we invite God into our blessing bankruptcy, we can begin to recognize false comfort and misplaced identity. It is here that the journey toward true blessing actually begins.
When Jesus walked into the garden of Gethsemane on the eve of His crucifixion to be “crushed for our iniquity,” it is apropos that the name Gethsemane means “oil press” (Is. 53:5). In Scripture, oil consistently symbolizes blessing. As the psalmist writes, “You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows”(Ps. 23:5, niv). In that first century garden, eons past Eden with her four rivers and onyx and gold, Jesus surrendered to His Father’s original storyline of blessing (2 Cor. 5:21; John 1:1). Their shared vision of a restored Eden, a blessed life for the lost and found, outshone His desire to preserve His own life.
Our Savior’s willing surrender reversed the rebellion of Eden—a truth we’ll explore more fully in the next chapter. Where humanity failed to obey, Jesus willingly accepted and endured the will of God the Father (Luke 22:42). So you see, God is not a miser withholding good things because we’ve done bad things. Rather, he is a self-giving Savior, offering a lifetime supply of loving connection and deep relationship with the Father to all who receive the gift of grace through him.
So what does all this mean? What do Willy Wonka, Eden, dust, and oil all have in common?
Friend, it’s a rich, robust mosaic of satisfying truth! An exceptionally selfless God longs to unravel the threads of self-sufficiency that bind you, so you can be restored to the all-sufficient love of our extravagant Creator. So this is your invitation to fall apart in the hands of a wonderfully wasteful God because your Maker is committed to using the dirt you’ve come from to give you the blessing you were made for.
He’s been doing that since the dawn of time.
Genesis 1:1–2
Culture says: Blessing is a human right. Scripture says: Blessing is a gift from God.
The first characteristic we see of God is that he created. If we share in his likeness as makers instead of takers, what is your favorite thing to make? Hospitable spaces? Art? Food? Spreadsheets? Conversation? Coffee? Organization? READ
The phrase “without form and void” is tohu wa-bohu in Hebrew. There was an empty “unreality” that God molded into our reality. What blessings in nature cause you to respond in awe and wonder?
What is the one phrase you see repeated throughout the entire creation account from Genesis 1:3–1:26? (Hint: It’s the first three words at the beginning of every verse.)
What does this tell you about the power of God’s word?
SPEAK
Read aloud Romans 9:20–21
In what ways have you fought against being clay used for common use instead of clay for special use?
In what ways have you seen God bless you with his shaping even if it was different than you would have chosen?
RISK
Meditate on Romans 10:8–11
What is your biggest doubt about a God that blesses you before you’ve proven yourself blessing-worthy? Would you prefer to prove yourself first?
When has God’s uncommon kindness caused you to feel blessed beyond what you deserved? Thank him for whatever he brings to mind.
Genesis 3
Genesis 5:1–2
CHAPTER 2
breaking up with eden
OVERDRESSED + UNINVITED
When we last left Adam and Eve they were unclothed and uninhibited. “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed” (Gen. 2:25, emphasis mine). The author of Genesis does not give us a single emotional clue as to how Adam and Eve felt before the fall, except for this: “they felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25 niv).
This is key to understanding what the biblical authors believed motivated God from this point forward.
First, it’s a little awkward to say, but apparently, God’s clothing of choice for his kids was nada. Before you rush to begin a Bible-approved nudist colony, let’s peel back what this means. It’s a societal norm to get dressed every morning, and I think we should keep doing that. However, this small act confirms that at some point in human history, a man-made mutation called “self-consciousness” dressed herself up and came to a party she was never invited to.
This eye-opening act disrupted the created order of God’s bare blessing and introduced an image-conscious, body-aware, perfection-hungry people who are desperate for a cover-up. “And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and [they] hid themselves from the presence of the Lord…” (Gen. 3:8).
Prior to sin, nothing eclipsed the goodness of God’s blessing. It was free to move and flourish, creating unimaginable unity across every inlet and outlet of existence. But Eden didn’t stay that way. What was once a high-functioning framework for human flourishing became a dismantled design—with a serpent in the carburetor.
So what happened?
What disrupted God’s original design for blessing?
It might surprise you, but the difference between the creation narrative in Genesis 1–2 and the fall in Genesis 3 centers on something that has gained major cultural and therapeutic traction over the last few decades: boundaries
While the concept of boundaries is ancient in Scripture, it found renewed language in modern psychology—particularly through the codependency recovery movement of the 1980s and the 1990s. Christian thought leaders like Dr. Henry Cloud and Dr. Curt Thompson helped bring this conversation into mainstream discipleship, showing that saying “no” isn’t selfish—it’s often profoundly loving and powerful. Today, boundaries are widely recognized as essential to emotional health, relational clarity, and self-awareness. But Scripture has always revealed this.
The first boundary we see set was by God himself before sin entered the world:
“You’re free to eat from any tree in the garden— except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Don’t eat from that one; when you do, you die.”
GENESIS 2:16–17, msg
If we look closely at the timing of temptation’s entrance into the story, two revealing details emerge.
First, God gives the boundary to Adam before Eve is created. That means Eve didn’t hear the instruction firsthand. Whether she received it clearly or accurately from Adam—we don’t know. What we do know is that trust was involved. Perhaps the scenario was that God trusted Adam to communicate the message clearly to Eve, or maybe Adam thought God would tell Eve himself. The text simply doesn’t say. However the message of this one loving boundary came to Eve, it was valuable information to protect. And the enemy knew it.
Second, immediately after Eve’s arrival into the story, the serpent enters the narrative. The timing is too intentional to ignore. The enemy targets the very first “no” God ever gave—aiming his temptation at the person most likely to question or misunderstand it. He reframes God’s boundary as restrictive instead of protective, limiting instead of loving.
What the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” really represents is this truth: God’s “no” is just as good and loving as His “yes.” The fullness of God’s blessing was meant to be experienced within the boundaries he lovingly set. But we often resist that idea because limits feel, well, limiting.
FOCUS BOOK: GENESIS
Context: Old Testament, Torah
Genre: Historical Narrative
Original audience: The Jewish people
Author’s intent: To set the stage for the story of redemption by tracing Israel’s journey to Egypt.
NEW STUFF
Narrative Genre: This literary style makes up 40 percent of the Old Testament and 60 percent of the New Testament.2
Narrative Purpose: “The purpose of the biblical narrative is not simply to tell us what happened, but to relate it to biblical faith in the overall context of redemptive history.”3
NEW TERMS
Cursed - (arar) v. — (to be cursed), to have divine harm or evil invoked upon.1
PUT IT IN THE BANK
“When the cool evening breezes were blowing, the man and his wife heard the LORD God walking about in the garden. So they hid from the LORD God among the trees. Then the LORD God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’
He replied, ‘I heard you walking in the garden, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.’”
GENESIS 3:8-10 nlt
Yet in the Garden of Eden, before sin entered the world, boundaries were already part of love. They weren’t given to restrict or control, but to protect and provide something deeper than a human could see with the naked eye—uninhibited trust and intimacy between God and his creation.
The garden of Eden was good because parameters were placed around self will. An unending platter of pleasure and desire was never God’s plan for our fulfillment. He knew that would never, ever satisfy. One of the minor prophets describes this state of human affairs accurately, “You shall eat but not be satisfied, and there shall be hunger within you” (Mic. 6:14).
Trusting God was a pre-existing condition that made paradise possible. But when God’s design was broken, humans resorted to self-diagnosing and selfmedicating. Adam and Eve did this with some string and a fig leaf when they created clothes of fig leafs for themselves (Genesis 3:7). They took raw material that was meant for comfort from the sun and turned them into comfort from their shame. The term “shadow side” took on a whole new meaning.
And what we find as the story progresses is that their handiwork was nothing more than a knock-off, a lie, a counterfeit; a proverbial dollar store mug made to break. A lie not held in human hands, but held in the deep recesses of the human heart. The natural human response to sin is still the same today: stringing ourselves along with self help. We can fix this. We can cover up the mess we made. We can hide the truth about ourselves
THE BLESSING OF THE CURSE
Could Adam and Eve really have done anything differently?
Have you ever wondered what might have happened if they had trusted the story and said “no” to the forbidden fruit? Why was it such a big deal anyway? Why couldn’t they have patched up the bruised and bloodied reality of a fallen creation themselves? And, let’s be honest, was fig-leaf underwear really the best solution they could come up with after classifying entire species of animals?
I don’t know. But regardless of how we wish the story had gone, what we find here is something unexpected: God’s lavish gift of limitation is essential to how God intends to bless us—even after the fall. The creation account reveals that humans were never given the power to fix themselves, only to enjoy themselves. Shame makes fixing ourselves nearly impossible. Self-loathing, or its pendulum representative, self-excusing— suffocates joy. But it should come as no surprise that while we were hiding clumsy needlework behind our backs, God was already ten steps ahead of our sin, pursuing us. The Bible shows us that God’s response to sin was two-fold: verbal and physical.
After sin entered the world, God wasn’t an angry dad who cancelled Christmas. He didn’t take back the gift of blessing. He kept his promise to us. He wanted us to still have access to our dirt-breathed birthright of blessing. He didn’t pick up planet earth, douse it in gasoline and throw a match on the whole mess, but he did have to do something.
Verbally, God created a blessing clause called the curse. Before you imagine God over a pot of bubbling brew cranking out curses made of newts eye and chlorophyll—keep in mind that God’s word is only capable of producing good. The curse was created so blessing could still be possible. Through this new system, enjoyment of life could still co-exist in a sinful world.
In Genesis 3:14–19, God rolls out this new decree in response to Adam and Eve’s disobedience:
The LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all...he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” To the woman he said, “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing... Your desire shall be contrary to your husband”...And to Adam he said… “cursed is the ground because of you...By the sweat of your face you shall eat...for you are dust, and to dust you will return.”
GENESIS 3:14–19, PARAPHRASE
It is important to understand that the curses God created weren’t primarily punishment. Yes, consequences came into play—they had to, “For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastises every son whom he receives” (Prov. 3:12; Heb. 12:6). But the curse was more than individualized discipline, it was the first justice system ever created.
One commentator called the curse of God retaliatory justice, “Adam and Eve sinned by eating; they would suffer in order to eat.”4 But once the action of human sin was addressed by the reaction of the curse, God didn’t settle for the sterility of moral balance. He is moved by love. That’s why you find God asking Adam and Eve where they were instead of locking them out of the house. And it’s also why you see him longing to bind up the broken-hearted instead of throwing their hearts away.
LEAF + LEATHER
God’s first response to sin was to re-clothe, both physically and spiritually. He did this in more than one way.
Returning to the story of the fall, we notice that God responded in two key moments. The first comes before he even speaks a word:
“And they heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.”
GENESIS 3:8
The first sound Adam and Eve heard after crossing God’s boundary wasn’t thunder or wrath—it was footsteps. Imagine hiding in the bushes of your own bad decision, only to hear the familiar rhythm of God walking the path you used to share with Him. That sound alone—for Adam and Eve, recognizing the cadence of His presence—spoke the truth about who they were when they had forgotten. It echoes the same thing to all of us today: You are mine. Turns out, God didn’t need to say anything to pierce the lie of shame in Eden; His nearness did that.
Without a word, Love was already communicating: I still want to be with you.
God’s first instinct to human failure wasn’t to strip them further, but to re-clothe them. That remains His heart for us today. For you, right now.
The second way God re-clothed them was tangibly and practically.
“But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” “And the LORD God made for Adam and his wife garments of skin and clothed them.”
GENESIS 3:21
Maybe God took one look at Adam and Eve’s chafe-inducing fig leaf bikini bottoms and made buttery soft replacements because he wanted them to be comfortable, but I think it’s safe to say at this point in our study, custom made comfort doesn’t seem to be God’s priority. However, most of us zoom past this part of the story without asking this question: where did God get the material?
The text doesn’t explicitly say, but have you ever considered that God had to kill an innocent animal to re-clothe his fallen creation? And not only that, but to turn animal skin into garments, God would have had to work the material himself— preparing it, tanning it, softening it. Just a few verses earlier, he was blessing the animals. Now, he’s using their innocent lives to cover the loss of innocence in humanity.
The implications here are rich, and worth pausing for.
You see, not only was a judicial system of blessings and curses being initiated, but the first animal sacrifice may have taken place too. No matter how you interpret the text, Adam and Eve’s covering was blood-bought. It was made possible through the death of an innocent animal. We will unpack the significance of animal sacrifice later, but let’s not make the mistake of placing our transfer sheet of modern day culture over a primeval history and then draw incorrect conclusions.
EVERY TIME WE REACH FOR THE FRUIT OF SELFRULE INSTEAD OF TRUSTING GOD’S BOUNDARIES, WE REHEARSE THE EXILE FROM EDEN ALL OVER AGAIN.
This isn’t God advocating for game hunting. This isn’t God’s military policy. This isn’t a bloodthirsty deity snapping the neck of an unsuspecting creature. This is a heartbroken dad weeping over the loss of a perfect expression of love and needing to reclothe it. For blessing to be restored, shame must be covered. So God himself went into the workshop of his mercy and compassion and constructed a way for their nakedness to be restoried.
I imagine God on bended knee looking into the eyes of the animal, weeping. I imagine that the animal came to him willingly. I imagine that the only motivation he had in mind was: I must remove my children’s shame. I imagine Jesus in the throneroom of heaven watching the Father address their shame by shedding innocent blood and fully understanding the deeper meaning at play. I imagine the agony he had in his heart when he carried the coverings to his children, blood splattered arms and all.
Is this the image you have when you read that God gave Adam and Eve garments to clothe them?
No matter how you engage with this part of the story, whether you think my creative license is ludicrous or helpful, we can conclude that death in all its forms was heart wrenching for the Creator and sobering for the sinner. To this day we walk around in a God-made garment called grace, to remind us that God has always done the bloody work of covering our shame.
For the modern day believer, when we refuse to wear the garment of grace and opt for self-sufficiency—we attempt to hide our inherent nakedness from a good God whose innocent Son died so we could be covered. And every time we reach for the fruit of self-rule instead of trusting God’s boundaries, we rehearse the exile from Eden all over again.
Oh, but do you hear it? The footsteps in the Garden? “But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’” (Gen. 3:9, niv).
They had lost their place in the plot of God’s story. And what was the plot? Well, the very center of God’s plan for humankind, which God details plainly for them a little later in Genesis 5:2:
“Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created.”
As we explored previously, the Bible often uses chiasms, a literary structure, that emphasizes the central idea. Genesis 5:2 is one such structure:
A – Created
B – Male and female
C – Blessed
B – Named “Adam”
A – When they were created
What the biblical authors are communicating is that God’s plan for blessing his people remained after the fall. In his overwhelming mercy and kindness, he chose not to just say that male and female were created. He chose to retain the blessing he attached to them.
One commentator said, “Divine image and blessing are continued among the human family, it would seem, without suspension.”5 God didn’t suspend blessing. He upheld it. He created a curse clause to preserve His justice, re-clothed us, and then re-centered our identity by calling us blessed, not just as a gift, but as a name.
Blessing isn’t just something we receive, it’s who we are.
To be blessed image-bearers of our Creator is the central truth of the creation story. And all of this unfolds in the first five chapters of the Bible.
Here’s the final takeaway: what began in Eden culminated on the cross. A.P. Ross makes a beautiful connection for us within the curse account of Genesis 3:14–19:
“...death, toil, sweat, thorns, the tree, the struggle, and the seed—all were later traced to Christ. He is the other Adam, who became the curse, who sweat great drops of blood in bitter agony, who wore a crown of thorns, who was hanged on a tree until he was dead, and who was placed in the dust of death.”6
Jesus bore the curse of sin, death, busywork, addiction, physical pain, humiliation, and all sorts of suffering for us. If God’s handmade coverings were the first threading of our blessing, then Jesus hanging naked on the cross was the final stitch in the quilt of the acquitted. We are covered, my friend, completely. And we are blessed, my friend, without suspension.
I feel like that is kind of a mic drop moment for how ridiculously rich we are to be post-cross people. So let’s drop the mic. And drop to our knees. Because if that doesn’t make you feel blessed, I don’t think you’re going to like the rest of this study.
Culture says: Blessing shouldn’t be limited. Scripture says: God’s limitations are love.
Genesis 3:10–11
Pause on this section for a moment: “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid…” When you think of God looking for you, do you tend to feel emotions of fear or of joy?
In verse 10, we see that Adam and Eve’s nakedness is what drove them to hide. What things in your own human failure cause you to want to hide from the presence of God? What does God say about our failures? See Hebrews 4:14–16.
God asks a very painful question for some of us: “Who told you that you were naked?” In your life, who are those people who’ve told you to be ashamed of yourself? Are you the one speaking that over yourself?
SPEAK
Read aloud 1 John 4:17–18
To face God with confidence requires we live like Jesus here on earth. What blessings have you seen come from living your life like Jesus did?
Have you fully experienced the “perfect love” of Jesus? In what ways would you like to experience this more?
If you have been afraid of God’s punishment, what does the Fall account tell you about how God disciplines his kids? Do you welcome God’s discipline as love? See Hebrews 12:11.
RISK
Meditate on James 4:8
Loyalty to God can be easily divided by distractions in our life. What is the most common distraction you struggle with that competes with God’s closeness?
Washing our hands is a daily occurence. How often do you experience the blessing of God washing and purifying your heart from the sins that you struggle with? Do you enjoy the process of confession?
CHAPTER 3
you lack nothing but leeks
Scripture Reading
Exodus 16:14–18
Exodus 19:1–8
Numbers 11:4–6
Deut. 28:1–3
Deut. 28:15–16
Jeremiah 31:31–34
THE LACK-NOTHING LIFE
A few months ago, I arrived at the car wash and realized I had forgotten my wallet. I’ll be honest, I forget my wallet a lot, but on this particular day I decided not to turn around. Instead, I felt compelled to ask God to supply the four quarters I needed to vacuum out my car. As strange as it may sound, I prayed my way through every corner of that car hoping for a coin to turn up. And one by one, I found all four.
However, the last quarter was so dirty that George Washington’s face was unrecognizable. It was covered in a substance I can only describe as “glub.” My fear was that the vacuum cleaner wouldn’t recognize it.
I started with the three shiny coins first. Plunk. Plunk. Plunk.
Then came the last “glubby” coin. I raised my hand, slid it into the slot, and by the grace of Almighty God the vacuum revved up. It was at that moment that I heard an old familiar whisper reverberate in my bones—you lack nothing.
Tears welled up in my eyes and instantly the car wash became a sacred space. Not because the vacuum worked or because I found the quarters—but because God was using something small and insignificant to remind me who he was. My provider. My helper. My friend. And to remind me who I was. Dependent. Reliant. Humbled. Poor. The quarter I had the least amount of hope for was the one that made all the difference.
And this is often how God works with all of us; he seems to really enjoy taking the least likely to succeed to the prom. Bible scholars call this the Fiotori principle, or
the “lesser to greater economy of God.”4 This part of God’s character is a really, really good thing for anyone who’s ever felt like a failure.
The Israelites, for example, were a failed “nation” by all accounts. They had no power, no resources, and no way to survive without God’s help. But God used the “glubby” quarter of the Israelites story to make all the difference in ours. He did this through something called covenants.
If you are familiar with the term covenant, awesome.
If you aren’t, that’s okay. We are going to take some time to gather a few coins from the floor of God’s foundation for blessing his people. Oh, and don’t be surprised when the glubbiest one we find is also the most valuable.
That’s kind of how God rolls.
THE FOUR COINS OF GOD’S COVENANT
First things first, what is a covenant?
“A covenant is a contractual arrangement between God and a person, or between human beings, which required binding action from one or both parties; one party often had higher status in the arrangement.”5 In case you are wondering who the “one party” with the higher status is, well, it’s God.
It’s best practice not to think of these contracts as “do’s” and “don’ts,” but as concrete love letters written to continue the grace covering that God made for Adam and Eve in the garden to all the generations that came after them. Covenants are different from the paper contracts we think of. They were activated by the inner workings of the heart. God willingly entered into several of these binding agreements with humans. They are the method by which God created platforms for his people to encounter the blessing of his presence despite their propensity for mucking it up.
There are technically five different major covenants that God initiates: Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, and the New.6 In layman’s terms, God wrote concrete love letters through Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus to make it possible to be with you.
The first covenant, the Noahic, is more like the vacuum cleaner at the car wash than the four coins used to make it work. The Noahic Covenant was made for universal use—it was unconditional in nature: “I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth” (Genesis 9:11 niv).
No matter who you are, or how you live your life, God blesses all humans with the beauty of his creation in a world where life is perpetually sustained. Everyone has access to enjoy natural wonders like the Grand Canyon or the aurora
FOCUS BOOK: EXODUS, NUMBERS, DEUTERONOMY
Context: Old Testament, Torah
Genre: Historical Narrative
Original audience: The Jewish people
Author’s intent: To explain how to live as holy people in a time of exile.
NEW STUFF
Major Covenants: Noahic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, New
Purpose of Covenants: To establish a “chosen relationship in which two parties make binding promises to each other.”3
NEW TERMS
Covenant - (Heb., berith) n. — a contractual arrangement between God and a person, or between human beings, which required binding action from one or both parties; one party often had higher status in the arrangement.1
Humankind - n. — all of the living human inhabitants of the Earth; often considered as a class of created beings.
Suzerainty treaty - n. — A conditional agreement where an enacting party impos[es] covenant stipulations upon the vassal state [another party].2
Royal grant - n. — An unconditional agreement between two parties where the lesser party is granted promises and provisions without stipulation.
PUT IT IN THE BANK
“Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’”
JOHN 6:32-22 niv
borealis. God doesn’t charge admission fees or install red-velvet ropes to keep unbelieving kids from enjoying his creation. Everyone gets to be a witness to it (Rom. 1:20). The covenant God made with Noah is one of the reasons why. The rest of the four covenants play different roles and have different functions— unconditional, conditional, and limited in nature. As a major theme throughout the Bible, we’ll see how covenants connect all of Scripture.
The first concrete love letter we will look at is the Abrahamic Covenant in Genesis 17:8. This covenant explains what God was offering to the nation of Israel:
I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.
A few chapters later, the Abrahamic Covenant is amplified. In Genesis 22:16, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Amazingly, Abraham asks no questions and obeys. But before Abraham goes through with it, God stops him and provides a different sacrifice. After that radical act of obedience, God amplifies his promise to Abraham with this addendum:
“And in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.”
GENESIS 22:18
Through Abraham’s unflinching trust, God’s unconditional blessing spilled over into the cracks of humanity worldwide.
The next love letter, the Davidic Covenant is “channelled” through the Abrahamic Covenant.7 This covenant extends the unconditional Abrahamic covenant to David’s—but again, God adds an additional layer of promise. We read in 2 Samuel that a perfect king would come and make blessing for “all nations of the earth” possible.
“When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever...and this is instruction for mankind, O LORD GOD!”
2 SAMUEL 7:12–13, 7:19, EMPHASIS MINE
The definition of mankind is, “all of the living human inhabitants of the Earth; often considered as a class of created beings.”8 Hopefully, when we connect these two covenants and their recipients we can begin to see the Red Sea parting to reveal dry land not just for one group of people, but for an ocean of all people. God’s intention was that anyone who believes in him will find footing under the covering of his unconditional care. Anyone.
You can clap if you want, that’s okay. However, we can’t cheer for unconditional covenants without dealing with the conditional ones.
GOD
DOESN’T CHARGE ADMISSION FEES OR INSTALL RED-VELVET ROPES TO KEEP UNBELIEVING KIDS FROM ENJOYING HIS CREATION.
The Mosaic Covenant was a conditional covenant where we find a lengthy pattern of blessings and curses that tend to fall into this pattern in Deuteronomy 28:
“And if you faithfully obey the voice of the LORD your God...Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field.” DEUT. 28:1–3
“But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD...Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field.” DEUT. 28:15–16
One commentator made this observation: “God’s invitation for Israel to take part in the covenant was a gracious one. However, blessing under this Mosaic Covenant was conditioned on the people’s obedience.”9 Another one said, “... the sovereign God who affixed the covenant was not an overbearing despot but a gracious Lord who was providing a means for blessing his people.”10 Just like God doesn’t want our stuff, God isn’t out to get us either.
The four coins of God’s covenant all add up to one purpose: to bless your socks off.
LAW-ABIDING CITIZENS
Let’s go a little deeper and look at the role of the law within the covenant God made with Israel. The Mosaic Covenant is centered on this law, which defined how Israel was to live in relationship with God and one another.
Throughout the first five books of the Bible over 600 laws are recorded. They cover nearly every area of the human experience from personal grooming to business dealings and crop planting. But since we don’t boil a baby goat in their mother’s milk and we aren’t tempted to steal our neighbor’s oxen, the law confuses most of us. Essentially, God wanted to create a “kingdom of priests,” a group of people whose lives looked different than the surrounding nations around them, but he also wanted to give them a roadmap for human flourishing within the cultural context that they were living in at the time.11
Basically, the law was meant to unlock blessing in the lives of “a specific people, in a specific place, during a specific time for a specific reason.”12 This is very helpful for the post-cross believer trying to decipher what applies and what doesn’t. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but what we can conclude is that God cares about our conduct in everyday life.
Even though the law was written to remind the Hebrews that they were God’s chosen people and to keep them from idolatry, its principles still apply to all believers.13 As followers of Jesus, even in a post-Christian society, we are called to live and love differently from the world around us. We are called to be holy, just, and morally responsible, pursuing the purposes behind God’s law—even if we do not follow every specific regulation.
ANYONE CAN ASPIRE TO BE A LAW-ABIDING CITIZEN, BUT IT TAKES MUCH BIGGER BRITCHES TO BE A KINGDOMBUILDING SAINT.
The Mosaic Covenant gave God’s law on stone tablets to Israel, but the New Covenant, promised through Jeremiah and Ezekiel, is written directly on human hearts (Jeremiah 31:33; Ezekiel 36:26–27) and extended to all who trust in Jesus. Paul confirms that this began with Jesus’ death and resurrection (Romans 2:15). Under the New Covenant, the Holy Spirit lives within believers, guiding us toward God’s ways, comforting and convicting us, and guarding our hearts as God’s own possession. This inner work transforms our lives, helping us live faithfully, reject adultery, dishonesty, drunkenness, greed, addiction, and every form of selfishness, because God’s law is no longer merely external but an internal reality shaping who we are.
But covenants aren’t just about our hearts—they’re also about the communities we get to create, love, and serve. The law, first written on stone and now written on our hearts, reminds us that we are called to care for the poor. We are invited to give our money, time, and talents generously and sacrificially. We are encouraged to open extra rooms and resources to the downtrodden. We are empowered to advocate for the voiceless, the unseen, and the misunderstood. When we honestly reflect on the purposes of the law in its original form, it’s hard to miss the call to humility and action today—because God actually does care about how we live, not to earn salvation, but to show the world who he truly is.
So no, we are not under the Mosaic law as New Covenant children, we are under grace through Jesus. It is the unconditional love of God and his compassion toward our human condition that should motivate us to do the things that holiness requires. If that isn’t the motivation, then God’s blessing becomes a gumball we’ve paid for out of our own gumption. Anyone can aspire to be a law-abiding citizen, but it takes a much grander vision of God’s blessing to embrace being a kingdom-building saint.
NO MORE OLD WINE
And that leads us to the last covenant, the last coin of the four we’ve been going through together. The New Covenant is so much more than an additional covenantal agreement. It is a complete shutdown and reboot of the entire system. All of the other covenants have been building up to this one. The New Covenant is the culmination of God’s bleeding heart for his busted up creation through the cross of Christ. Now, to be clear, I don’t believe this covenant completely replaces or nullifies the others. Rather, it is my conviction that the New Covenant unites all the previous covenants, binding them together like a book and serves as the container that connects them in perfect love.
Thomas R. Schreiner wrote in his book, Covenant and God’s Purpose for the World,
...under the old covenant free and total access to God wasn’t granted. God’s presence was specially in the Most Holy Place in the tabernacle/temple, and it was accessed by the high priest only once a year (Lev. 16; Heb. 9:6–8). By way of contrast, Jesus’s once and for all sacrifice truly cleanses the conscience of his people (Heb. 9:9, 14; 10:33)...The new covenant is clearly superior to the old covenant because it grants free and confident access to God by virtue of Christ’s death.
Unlimited access to God the Father through Christ the Son is the ultimate blessing of the New Covenant.
Even though the nation of Israel did not keep their promises to God and broke their end of the bargain time and time again, the law’s fulfillment wasn’t dependent on their perfection, it was and always will be, dependent upon God’s perfect love. I mentioned this verse already, but let’s read it together.
Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers...For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
JEREMIAH 31:31–33
Israel would have found comfort in these words because even in the midst of exile and failure, God was promising a future restoration that depended entirely on His faithfulness, not theirs. The covenant’s promise to write His law on their hearts signaled an intimate, transformative relationship with him—one that went beyond external rules and human effort.
For the original audience, this meant that despite repeated failures and the national crisis of exile, God had not abandoned them. If we struggle to be comforted by these words, it could be because we are unaware of our own exile. Israel faced nationalistic exile; we live in an individualistic exile. Yet, much like Israel—“whose fundamental problem wasn’t political but spiritual”—our postChristian culture has crafted its own “book of comfort,” filled with self-assigned ways to cope with an exilic experience of the soul.14
We collect ways to numb, escape, experience, justify, nullify, and indulge. That isn’t the way free people are meant to experience comfort from their God, but it is the way slaves interact with their idols.
Throughout the book of Jeremiah, God uses words like rebuild, restore and rejoice to give legs to his plan to rescue his exiles. Humans began to speculate how God would do this, how powerful the Messiah would be, and how successful the nation of Israel would become—but God never told them. Instead, he promised a rebuilding of his temple within them, a restoration of the broken hearts between them, and an endless rejoicing over them.
And ultimately, God fulfilled his promise of the New Covenant by saving the “glubbiest” coin for last. In a twist that no one saw coming, Jesus emerges on the scene of redemptive history. He was the most unexpected person God would use to introduce the hope of the world into human history. This teaches us that God’s blessing often looks unrecognizable at first. Did you catch that? You might not even be able to recognize God’s blessing when it unfolds. Why? For me, I often miss what God is up to because I am too busy pushing disappointment around my plate.
HE PROMISED A REBUILDING OF HIS TEMPLE WITHIN THEM, A RESTORATION OF THE BROKEN HEARTS BETWEEN THEM, AND AN ENDLESS REJOICING OVER THEM.
The comfort God promised his people in Isaiah and Jeremiah wasn’t to meet their expectations or institute a life of ease, it was that he was coming back for them. It wasn’t that they would get their way, it was that he would make a way. God was not going to settle for broken walls and a shattered nation (Jer. 31:33). He wanted unlimited visitation rights with his incarcerated exiles. And he did it through condemning his non-guilty Son to death for the guilt of the world.
It would be a mistake to rush to the conclusion that somehow the New Covenant is easier to obey than the old. I know it’s hard to believe that anything could be more difficult than following 600 laws perfectly—but apparently, loving God and loving others without agenda is (Matt. 22:37–40).
“You have heard it said…” was a famous line Jesus used when reinterpreting the Old Testament law for the New Covenant. In his words, lust became worse than adultery (Matt. 5:28), hate became worse than murder (Matt. 5:22), revenge became unacceptable (Matt. 5:38–39), and walking an extra mile while your enemy cracked the whip was recommended (Matt. 5:41). The call to holiness was raised to a new standard: the life of Jesus. Keep in mind that while Jesus’ teachings call believers to a radical, heart-level standard, every generation and tradition has wrestled with how that standard is lived out, understood, or applied.
What isn’t up for debate is that the New Covenant calls us to love others beyond what the law requires—and certainly beyond what comes naturally. We are called to love fully, unconditionally, and at times in ways that may even challenge our own ethical instincts. Our radical, Jesus-centered love may offend those who see grace as a drunk glutton giving belligerent blessing to the “not good enough.” And often, the offended party? It’s you and me.
And here’s where our hearts speak up: But what about me, God? This isn’t fair. Are you going to do anything about this? How can you ask me to love them when they act like that? These questions are part of the tension of living under the New Covenant—learning to trust God’s call to radical love even when it doesn’t make sense to our natural instincts.
Here’s what I believe lies at the root of what offends people about Jesus: everyone who believes in him gets a blessed life.
Everyone can come to the God of love—no questions asked. And when we’re honest, that doesn’t sit well if the love of God hasn’t been etched into the walls of our heart. The religious spirit prefers rules, mitigations, and separation. The law apart from Jesus wants to keep people outside of God’s presence until they’ve “done it right.” The problem is that this feels like justice when we are wronged, yet unjust when someone else is wronged by us.
So I’ll say it plain and simple: the New Covenant makes no room for the same old sin. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). The truly blessed person is the one who knows they are four quarters short of footing the bill. Every. Single. Time.
BREAKOUT
Culture says: You’ll never have enough Scripture says: You lack nothing.
READ
Exodus 16:16–21
How much did God tell them to gather (“according” to what)? How does this type of reliance on God’s provision differ from what culture tells us?
What does verse 18 say about those who “gather much”, or the New Testament equivalent, “those who’ve been given much” (See Luke 12:48) — what should they have left over?
In your own life, do you have leftover time, leftover funds, leftover energy? If not, could you be “gathering” more than you need?
SPEAK
Read aloud John 6:28–33
Who is our true bread? Read John 6:35 for your answer.
Jesus said, “It was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but my Father gives you true bread from heaven” (v. 32). Do you often look to man (like the Israelites did to Moses) to meet your needs? If so, write down a few things you can boldly ask God to provide for you instead.
RISK
Meditate on Exodus 16:21
“Morning by morning, they gathered it…” Do you have a morning routine of gathering food from God’s word and presence?
If you do, how have you noticed it sustain you through the day? If you do not, how do you find yourself getting through each day? What are you filling yourself with?
Make a plan to meet with God daily. Share what that looks like with your group so you can be held accountable.
CHAPTER 4
wise guys + smart songs
Scripture Reading
Proverbs 11:24–30
RULES OF THE ROAD
When trying to carefully interpret the Bible, it’s helpful to think of each genre of scripture like prepping for a cross-country road trip. Historical narrative, which we have studied so far, is much like the extensive research you’d do before pulling out of the driveway. It is a detailed description of where God’s people are going based upon where they have already been.
The nation of Israel has been our feet-on-the-ground folks whose flat tires have helped us swerve past gnarly nails ourselves. If we lean into the narrative hard enough we can see which routes to avoid and which on-ramps to take when it comes to trusting God more. This has been incredibly helpful in understanding God’s purpose for blessing his people so far.
So if historical narrative is “road trip research” for biblical blessing, wisdom literature and poetry is the sideroad you take to avoid traffic and enjoy the drive.
The first thing we need to grasp about wisdom literature and poetry is that it’s meant to make us feel something, not to tell us what happened. While it’s super tempting to pick passages based upon what direction they provide for us, we must resist giving into our cultural inclination to consume instead of contemplate. These texts work best when we reflect upon how the fruit of a blessed life feels and ask ourselves if we actually feel the same way.
The second thing we need to remember is that this genre has been developed within the framework of historical narrative. When we become Bible readers who forgo biblical narrative (the story of Israel) and prefer personal narrative (our own story), the fruit in these books becomes disconnected from the larger story. To
be careful interpreters of scripture, everything must be traced back to the stalk of the Israelite saga.
So what have we learned so far?
We’ve spent these last few chapters unpacking God’s purpose for creating and bestowing blessing on his chosen people. We’ve come to see that God’s intention from the very beginning was to bless his creation—to impart divine favor to the people that he loved. We’ve also learned that God proved he would go to great lengths to make relationship with Israel possible by entering into covenant after covenant with them. So it’s helpful to think of wisdom literature and poetry as covenant continuum.
Our focus books, Job, Psalms and Proverbs don’t discontinue or contradict the narrative we’ve read so far, they complement it. Much like a harmony to a melody, these books enhance God’s method of blessing us by revealing how one’s heart feels when they experience it.
Our focus characters, Job, David and Solomon, didn’t live particularly blessed lives circumstantially. Job was the poster child for pain. David spent a large chunk of his life hiding in caves for fear of his life. And Solomon was given everything a person could want and was still ruled by dissatisfaction.
Each book gives us something different to reflect on. Job will invite us to reflect on feeling blessed through suffering. Psalms will invite us to reflect on feeling blessed through praise. And Proverbs will invite us to reflect on feeling blessed through generosity.
So let’s pause in the prose and allow God access to our hearts so we don’t get too far down the road without taking in the view.
HEALTH: JOB GETS THE WORST JOB EVER
The book of Job is bold. It is unapologetic and blunt. In it, we are invited to ask hard questions of a good God. It is a long, confounding, and oftentimes, maddening poem about a man who did all the right things and still suffered greatly. This book of longform speeches is an ingeniously orchestrated piece of literature that tests the boundaries of logic and love.
Job was a wonderful, God-fearing guy who had a ton of material blessing taken away from him by Satan through no fault of his own. Because of this, Job can be a very puzzling book when taken out of biblical context.
So let’s ask why this book would have been important to the people of Israel at this time? Some commentators suggest that this book could be, “an elaborate
FOCUS BOOKS: JOB, PROVERBS, PSALMS
Context: Old Testament, Writings
Genre: Wisdom Literature and Poetry
Original audience: The Jewish people
Author’s intent: To instruct readers through insight and expression.
NEW STUFF
Poetry Genre: To “reflect the experiences, insight, and revelation of God.”4
Poetry Purpose: An “interpretive presentation of human experience in artistic form. It typically seeks to elicit an emotive response.”5
Wisdom Literature Genre: “A collection of apophthegms, (a short, witty, and instructive saying) that has currency among those who fear the Lord.”6
Wisdom Literature Purpose: General guidelines for godly living.
NEW TERMS
Repent - v. — to feel remorse for; feel sorry for; be contrite about.1
Wealth - n. — an abundance of material possessions and resources.2
Blessed - (esher) adj. — characterized by happiness and being highly favored (as by divine grace).3
To Prosper - (thrive) v. — to make steady favorable progress or succeed.
PUT IT IN THE BANK
“Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.”
PROVERBS 28:13
midrash (type of commentary) on Deuteronomy 28.”7 If we remember from last chapter, Deuteronomy 28 was incredibly vital to the Mosaic Covenant. In that chapter, there was a lengthy list of blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience—however, what Deuteronomy 28 makes no room for is the reality of undeserved suffering.
The book of Job makes room.
Job “...stands as a massive counterpoint to the Deuteronomistic cycles of blessing and deprivation based on obedience and disobedience.”8 Job wasn’t punished because he was disobedient and he wasn’t blessed because he was obedient. He was taken from and given back to. He was sick and made well. He was seen by God and yet misunderstood by others. He was in pain and he was loved. He was in grief and he remained faithful. He was in underserved exile from his friends and community and was, ultimately, returned to them.
This isn’t a contradiction, it is real life tension. And if we spend enough time connecting the dots, we will see Jesus in the character of Job—this ancient poem is an arrow pointing forward to the Man that suffered and was without sin.
If you’ve ever suffered a great loss, deep grief, unexpected tragedy, a financial fall out, an unexpected betrayal, a health crisis, or the death of a marriage as a faithful follower of Jesus—it’s okay to ask hard questions of a good God.
Job did.
But Job never turned his heart away from God. Ironically, Job’s wife tells him to do just that in Job 2:9, “Curse God and die.” Just give up Job, your God isn’t good. But the irony is held in the fact that the Hebrew word she uses for “curse” is barak—which we know actually means blessed.9 In seasons of suffering it’s common for blessing to come out as cursing if you don’t understand who God is in the middle of it.
Job knew his God. He believed God’s heart was to bless him and not to curse him. Yes, he asks very dark questions. He throws proverbial plates. He wishes he were dead. He was deeply, deeply disturbed and felt abandoned by everyone.
But he was able to remain faithful to God. How? His foundation was well built before bad news struck. Before he suffered unimaginable loss, Job was a wealthy and well-connected social activist who fought on behalf of the poor, orphan and widow. In Job 29, we learn that he used his wealth to “deliver the poor who cried for help and the fatherless who had none to help him” (v. 12). He mentions that when he had wealth and notoriety, people would hear him coming into the city and simply call him “blessed” (v.11).
WE ARE INVITED TO ASK HARD QUESTIONS OF A GOOD GOD.
Job’s nickname was blessed. It was his identity through and through.
However, the very first instance of the word blessed in the book of Job comes from the mouth of Satan: “Have you not put a hedge around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land” (Job 1:10, emphasis mine).
Satan has a strategy for getting faithful people to question God: burn down the blessed hedge around their house. He also has a strategy for getting people to judge other people based upon their lack of “hedges” ( i.e., health, wealth and happiness). Eliphaz, one of Job’s know-it-all friends, reflects this:
“Behold, blessed is the one whom God reproves, therefore despise not the discipline to the Almighty. For he wounds, but he binds up; he shatters, but his hands heal.”
JOB 5:17
Eliphaz is right in a general sense. The Bible explicitly says, “the Lord disciplines those he loves” (Prov. 3:12; Heb. 12:6) and, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Ps. 147.3). But God was doing something in the life of Job that he wasn’t doing in the life of Eliphaz. God works in the specific minatue of our everyday life, orchestrating events big and small for his glory and our good.
The thing is that Eliphaz’s assessment sounds pretty good. Suck it up, Job. You must deserve it. God knows what he’s doing. Get yourself together! But after forty two chapters of loss and lament, the book of Job ends not with judgement, but with blessing. Before God restores all of what Job has lost as a reward for his faithfulness, something unexpected happens: Job repents.
Wait. What? If Job wasn’t being disciplined why did he repent? Let’s take a closer look.
Job says, “I know you can do all things...therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:2, 6). The Hebrew word for repent in this passage is actually one of our study’s buzzwords—am comforted. In a beautiful twist we see how “repent” and “comfort” are actually the same thing.10 Unlike our cultural ideal of comfort without hardship—Job reveals that true comfort can only come through trial. In the ashes of affliction, Job found the comfort he sought through the act of repentance, and it was a gift to his aching soul.
This would have been an invaluable story for the nation of Israel to hear because their history proved how much they bristled against discomfort. In their wilderness wanderings, they often took for granted the blessing that God was with them wherever they went. Job’s drama was an invitation to search their own hearts and to repent of their complaint, complacency and idolatry.
The Israelites weren’t as faithful as Job. And let’s be honest, neither are we.
When we peer into the heart of this hurting, grieving soul, we are invited to see that Job’s greatest treasure wasn’t to be reintroduced to his riches, lost loved ones, or level of influence—but to be rightly rewarded according to his faith. Job’s final words of repentance reveal the heart of a comforted soul: I know you can do all things.
HAPPINESS | DAVID DOES A HAPPY DANCE
David blesses like a boss.
He wrote 73 of the 150 Psalms and possibly more. He is one of the most overtly expressive authors in the Old Testament when it comes to how good it feels to be God’s kid. He also writes about how bad it can feel to be human. David lives in the tension of truth and anticipation. We won’t be studying his Psalms of lament, but like Job, it is perfectly okay to bring God our heartaches—as long as we also bring him our happiness.
In the Psalms, David uses two different versions of blessed, barak and esher
We are already familiar with barak, the most common word for blessed in the Old Testament. As a refresher, it is a Hebrew word that means to invoke or enact divine favor on someone.11 In response to God’s favor in the blessed storyline of the nation of Israel, David does an incredible job of blessing God back in his writings.
“I bless the Lord who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me.”
PS. 16:7
“The Lord lives, and blessed be my rock, and exalted be the God of my salvation—”
PS. 18:46
“My foot stands on level ground; in the great assembly I will bless the Lord.”
PS. 26:12
“Blessed be the Lord! For he has heard the voice of my pleas for mercy.”
PS. 28:6
“Blessed be the Lord, for he has wondrously shown his steadfast love to me when I was in a besieged city.”
PS. 31:21
GOD WORKS IN THE SPECIFIC MINATUE OF OUR EVERYDAY LIFE.
“I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth.”
PS. 34:1
“So I will bless you as long as I live; in your name I will lift up my hands.”
PS. 63:4
David praised God all the time. This was partly because he was incredibly privileged to enjoy God’s steadfast love under the Davidic Covenant. David isn’t shy about the joy he experiences because of that gift. The closeness he experienced through the covenant comforted David in times of trouble. (Psssst. You have access to this very same relationship with God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.)
The second type of “blessed” that David and the psalmists used was esher. Esher is a Hebrew adjective for one “characterized by happiness and being highly favored (as by divine grace).”12
“Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. Blessed is the man against whom the Lord counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit.”
PS. 32:1–2
“Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage!”
PS 33:12
“Blessed is the one who considers the poor! In the day of trouble the Lord delivers him;”
PS 41:1
“Blessed is the one you choose and bring near, to dwell in your courts! We shall be satisfied with the goodness of your house, the holiness of your temple!”
PS 65:4
“Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.”
PS 84:5
The Psalms say we experience happiness when we realize we are forgiven. We experience happiness when no score is kept. We experience happiness when we trust God’s power and sovereignty. We experience happiness when we see the poor as a gift and not a burden. We experience happiness when God brings us near himself. We experience happiness when we knock on the door of his presence and it swings wide open.
And in effect the opposite is also true.
We experience sadness if we don’t ever think we are wrong. We experience sadness when we are the ones keeping score. We experience sadness when we try to control God. We experience sadness when we ignore the plight of the poor because we don’t know how to help. We experience sadness when we don’t think proximity to God makes any difference. We experience sadness when we skip that door altogether and choose isolation instead.
David was a happy guy because he was in the habit of being someone who blessed God and blessed others. And as we know, Americans aren’t particularly happy. Forty million Americans struggle with some sort of anxiety or depression in the United States.13 The Psalms suggest that a regular routine of blessing God and blessing others would increase happiness levels. It certainly did for David.
If you follow Jesus, the blessing of happiness should be evident in you. Eeyore somberness should not be the only response we have to our sin. There should also be bubbly gratitude that erupts from the heart of a sinner covered by grace. David understood that you couldn’t be happy outside of God’s presence and that truth was what made him one of the loudest singers in the room.
WEALTH: SOLOMON’S MONEY MATTERS
Let’s talk money, honey.
Money is a big theme in the book of Proverbs. And since we’ve talked about health and happiness, let’s read a little bit about what the world’s wealthiest wise guy had to say about finances.
“Honor the LORD with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.”
PROV. 3:9–10
“A rich man’s wealth is his strong city; the poverty of the poor is their ruin.”
PROV. 10:15
“One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want. Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered.”
PROV. 11:24-25
“The ransom of a man’s life is his wealth, but a poor man hears no threat.”
PROV. 13:8
“Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it.”
PROV. 13:11
“A rich man’s wealth is his strong city, and like a high wall in his imagination.”
PROV. 18:11
“Whoever oppresses the poor to increase his own wealth, or gives to the rich, will only come to poverty.”
PROV. 22:16
Solomon understood that wealth was given to serve a specific purpose: to bless God and to bless others. We see this theme in Solomon’s writings as well because his father was the Psalmist, King David, and undoubtedly had a role in developing this truth in him. Solomon is a great example of what it means to be righteous and rich.
There are many people I know who are blessed with wealth and are ridiculously humble and generous with it. They are the ones who send you checks in the mail right when you need a miracle to show up. They host elaborate dinner parties and pour you the best wine. They give of themselves to those in need all the time. These folks have been blessed financially but aren’t identified by it.
It’s tempting to think it’s easy for the well-off, the Solomons in your life if you will, to honor God with their money because they have oodles of it. But the reality is that having material wealth is a large responsibility. The narrative of Solomon’s life gives us a glimpse into the temptations and trials that wealthy people face. He was given his immense wealth for a reason—so he could govern the people of Israel well (1 Kings 3:10-13). And at first, he does. He honors both God and Israel by building the temple.
But his healthy perspectives on finances begin to crumble even as he said they would: “A rich man’s wealth is his strong city, and like a high wall in his imagination” (Prov. 18:11). Ultimately, Solomon’s desensitization to lavish privilege combined with his addiction to pleasure culminated in a very bad investment.
In 1 Kings 11:1-8, Solomon used his money to build altars to his wives’ foreign gods, Ashtoreth (a sex and fertility goddess), Molech (whom required child sacrifices) and Chemosh (called the “destroyer” due to the cruelty his worship required).14 This marked the beginning of his “strong city’s” implosion.
Despite Solomon’s struggle, a fellow named Agur was able to slide in his two cents on money and blessing in Proverbs 30. In it, we find a God-honoring guardrail for those who’ve been blessed by wealth or are tempted to believe they should be:
“...give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ or lest I be poor and
steal and profane the name of my God.”
PROV. 30:8
Agur’s words mirror those found in Deuteronomy 8 when the Israelites were reminded not to forget the wilderness, where they were provided with the blessing of God’s presence:
Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
DEUT. 8:11-14
To the original audience, this would have been a subtle reminder of that less than stellar portion of Israelite history in Exodus 32 where they were caught worshipping a golden calf. Thousands of years separate us from pagan idol worship so this can get lost in translation, but the reality is that they succumbed to what still trips us up today: they created off-brand blessing to fit the mold of their culture’s worship practices. They wanted to worship gold with a side of God. They created something out of their own means to manufacture security in an insecure situation.
This is where Solomon’s altars, Agur’s words and the Israelite’s golden calf find their intersection with our culture. We don’t melt our money, but we worship other things in addition to God, which the Old Testament calls idolatry.
We inflate savings accounts, take out school loans, refinance mortgages, collect investments, get better clothes, eat better food, drink healthier drinks, get more subscriptions, increase car payments and collect degrees, all the while thinking, “Thank you God for blessing me with such security!” Those things aren’t bad, but a life built on them isn’t rooted in the faith required of those who follow Jesus.
I’ll confess that I’ve been faithless in this area at times. I am a person who’s thanked God for self-created security. I’ve manipulated resources and relationships to bless myself instead of allowing God to bless me in his time and for his purposes. The good news is that God doesn’t see things like we do, and in his infinite kindness he gives us the gift of insecurity so our faith can be strengthened.
Do you see insecurity as a gift? Parker Palmer writes, “Where the world sees impossibility, God sees potential. Where the world sees comfort, God sees idolatry. Where the world sees insecurity, God sees occasions for faith.”
Faith is what leads us into the dark nights of suffering and helps us find comfort there. Faith is what enables us to be happy people who praise God. Faith is what provides us with unshakeable security no matter how big or small our incomes are. Only faith can animate a life where loss becomes our trust, praising God becomes our upper, and generosity becomes our wealth.
Culture says: Blessed are the healthy, wealthy, and happy. Scripture says: Blessed are the faithful.
READ
Job 31:24-28
Have you ever been in a season where “gold” (or lack thereof) has been your trust and confidence? How did God lovingly correct you?
Why do you think there is a danger when one has “rejoiced because my wealth was abundant or because my hand had found much?” (v. 25).
How much time, energy, and talent do you spend on trying to make money?
Share ways you’ve invited (or would like to invite) God into the process of making decisions about how your blessing is made and spent.
SPEAK
Read aloud Psalm 1:1-4
The word “prosper” in these verses means to thrive. Do you feel like you are in a season of thriving? Why or why not?
A large part of thriving in this passage is tied to God’s word as the source that waters and sustains us (v. 2). Do you delight in God’s word? Share a verse or passage that has encouraged, strengthened, or challenged you in this study so far.
RISK
Meditate on Proverbs 16:9
What do you think the difference is between planning your way and letting the Lord establish your steps?
Do you ever struggle with envy (or judgement) of others’ wealth or possessions? If so, what do you imagine they experience that you do not?
Take a few moments to capture God’s blessings in a few sentences. Whether that be your job, your children, your upbringing, your schooling, your passions, or your relationships.
IN-BETWEEN BLESSINGS
(a reflection on Psalm 72)
The time period between the Old Testament and the New Testament is called the intertestamental period. Instead of moving directly from the Old Testament into the new, we are going to spend some time taking bite-sized chunks out of one of the most bountiful Psalms in the Bible.
Just for context, if we were to continue tracing the narrative to the end of the Old Testament we would find this outcome: the nation of Israel ended up in exile enslaved to their sin. The curses that were laid out in the Law came upon them and the blessings were nowhere to be found. So for the next few chapters, we are going to camp out in Psalm 72 to get a glimpse of what God’s plan was to rescue his runaways from themselves.
Psalm 72 is one of only two Psalms authored by Solomon, the wealthy wise guy we studied in the last chapter. In a sentence, Psalm 72 is written by the wisest man who ever lived in the genre of biblical poetry and is packed with prophetic language. It’s quite the emotive mash up, and the perfect way to pace ourselves as we cross over into the promised land of Jesus-sized blessing in the New Testament.
1 Give the king your justice, O God, and your righteousness to the royal son!
2 May he judge your people with righteousness, and your poor with justice!
3 Let the mountains bear prosperity for the people, and the hills, in righteousness!
4 May he defend the cause of the poor of the people, give deliverance to the children of the needy, and crush the oppressor!
5 May they fear you while the sun endures, and as long as the moon, throughout all generations!
6 May he be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth!
7 In his days may the righteous flourish, and peace abound, till the moon be no more!
8 May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth!
9 May desert tribes bow down before him, and his enemies lick the dust!
10 May the kings of Tarshish and of the coastlands render him tribute; may the kings of Sheba and Seba bring gifts!
11 May all kings fall down before him, all nations serve him!
12 For he delivers the needy when he calls, the poor and him who has no helper.
13 He has pity on the weak and the needy, and saves the lives of the needy.
14 From oppression and violence he redeems their life, and precious is their blood in his sight.
15 Long may he live; may gold of Sheba be given to him! May prayer be made for him continually, and blessings invoked for him all the day!
16 May there be abundance of grain in the land; on the tops of the mountains may it wave; may its fruit be like Lebanon; and may people blossom in the cities like the grass of the field!
17 May his name endure forever, his fame continue as long as the sun! May people be blessed in him, all nations call him blessed!
1–4
Give the gift of wise rule to the king, O God, the gift of just rule to the crown prince. May he judge your people rightly, be honorable to your meek and lowly. Let the mountains give exuberant witness; shape the hills with the contours of right living. Please stand up for the poor, help the children of the needy, come down hard on the cruel tyrants.
4–8
Outlast the sun, outlive the moon— age after age after age. Be rainfall on cut grass, earth-refreshing rain showers. Let righteousness burst into blossom and peace abound until the moon fades to nothing.
Rule from sea to sea, from the River to the Rim.
9–14
Foes will fall on their knees before God, his enemies lick the dust. Kings remote and legendary will pay homage, kings rich and resplendent will turn over their wealth. All kings will fall down and worship, and godless nations sign up to serve him, Because he rescues the poor at the first sign of need, the destitute who have run out of luck.
He opens a place in his heart for the down-andout, he restores the wretched of the earth. He frees them from tyranny and torture— when they bleed, he bleeds; when they die, he dies.
15–17
And live! Oh, let him live! Deck him out in Sheba gold. Offer prayers unceasing to him, bless him from morning to night. Fields of golden grain in the land, cresting the mountains in wild exuberance, Cornucopias of praise, praises springing from the city like grass from the earth. May he never be forgotten, his fame shine on like sunshine. May all godless people enter his circle of blessing and bless the One who blessed them.
DAY 1 | READ | PSALM 72:1–4
To be blessed is to seek justice.
The king described in these first verses is not a self-promoter who sits in high towers and governs from the safe space of hierarchy and privilege. This isn’t a king (or a political power) that our postChristian society understands.
This king is not described as someone who sequesters himself to safe corners of his home watching Netflix and sending calls straight to voicemail either. This king is not enslaved to the curse of comfort. He is both real and important as well as available and accessible.
This king judges people rightly, not based upon appearances. He is an activist for the heartbroken. He gives deliverance to children who are in need. He doesn’t mess around with those who take advantage of the underprivileged.
These verses echo the Messianic verse in Isaiah 11:4:
“...but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth.”
It is also expressed that when this king rules justly over our lives and over the earth, prosperity increases (Ps. 72:3). However, in Psalm 72 Solomon isn’t talking about prosperity as a booming economy, (although he would know precisely what that would look like since he is arguably the wealthiest king in the history of the world.) What he is describing is much like what we read of in Isaiah 11, which is peace (shalom) and translated as “harmonious wholeness.”1
This kingdom’s net worth isn’t based on monetary value, personal success, or personal comfort. It is based upon how much shalom is happening— how much peace and rest someone has in their everyday life. This type of profit can take place in the position of the wealthy or the poor. It is an equalizer, a unifier, a helper, and a gift. It is no respecter of person, status or class. And yet it is the one thing that people of all backgrounds, incomes and positions long for.
To be blessed in the kingdom to come, God’s people will be those who seek justice for others not people who put themselves in positions over others.
SPEAK
Who do you personally know that is “poor,” “oppressed,” or needing “justice”? What do you think qualifies someone to be in those categories?
Do you struggle to care enough about the poor to know any by name?
SPEAK
When was the last time you provided a meal for someone who couldn’t afford one?
When was the last time you asked for help with something you couldn’t afford?
To be blessed is an eternal reality.
This king’s reign doesn’t end.
Solomon can’t be writing this as a prayer about his own reign as king, unless he was highly delusional. And since we know for certain that he was one of the wisest men who ever lived according to 1 Kings 3:12, he must be writing about someone else. Solomon was a wise guy, yes, but as his story unfolds he wasn’t necessarily refreshing like “the rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth.” (v. 6)
In some ways, Solomon kind of stank as a God-honoring king. His wealth gave him unlimited access to personal preference and he took it. His love for God and his ability to rule with God-given wisdom started strong, but it sputtered into a life of sin motivated by his temporary love for women who didn’t love God.
He didn’t have his mind on the eternal reign of this king, just on the temporary aspects of his own. His divided heart ultimately cut Israel’s rise to power short and the empire imploded. Instead of choosing the costly sacrifice of denying his own desires, he chose the knock off brand of blessing and broke God’s heart as well as his own kingdom.
However, Solomon’s failure to remain faithful to the Davidic covenant wasn’t abnormal. It was just one of the many ways in which stories of fallen kings throughout the biblical narrative enhanced the need for a new kingdom to be established through the Messiah (1 Kings 11:13). DAY 2 |
SPEAK
Do you tend to think about the temporary worries of this life over the eternal reign of Jesus? Why do you think temporary things often overshadow permanent things?
Write down one eternal blessing that you are looking forward to experiencing.
Write down one eternal blessing you are experiencing currently. How is that a foreshadow of what’s to come in eternity?
RISK
Do you want more than what you have right now? What would those things be?
Our “hungers” are simply a gift from God to help us identify where we believe blessing is found. Thank God for your hunger by writing down a few ways you have seen him satisfy you.
To be blessed is to be ruled over.
This section is one of authority. This king has “dominion from sea to sea.” This is no small kingdom, it stretches far and wide. Solomon is hinting at the in-breaking of a new kingdom, one that is comprised of Israel and the outsider. This is clearly a kingdom expansion plan, but not one that is built upon violence and victory—one that is built on extravagant worship.
“May all kings bow down before him, all nations serve him.” A human isn’t born wanting to serve another, that only happens when we understand how indebted we are to one in higher authority than ourselves. Jeremiah prophesies of this in Chapter 31:33-34:
For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put My law within them , and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be My people. And no longer shall every one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, “Know the LORD,” for they all shall know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more.
In verse 8, Solomon uses a very specific River to begin the boundary of this eternal king’s reign—the Euphrates. And just like that we are taken back to the garden of Eden. Back to the creation account. Back to where blessing was born. Not only will this kingdom no longer be bordered strictly by the nation of Israel, it won’t be bound by anything outside of a person.
This verse creatively expresses that the boundary of this king’s reign will move from places on a map to the internal compass of the heart. The coordinates of the new Euphrates to come? The longitude of the human heart met by the latitude of a brand new Spirit:
“I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”
EZEK. 36:25-27 niv
When this king carves rivers of life into the human heart, Israel will no longer be the only nation that bows down, pays tribute, and adores him. All nations will be falling down before him out of awe for his ability to melt the stone of stubborn sin in their souls.
SPEAK
What do you feel when you hear the word submission? Who do you submit to on a daily basis? What does authority look like in your life?
When you think of being protected, how does that make you feel?
Reflect on ways that God’s authority has protected you in the past.
RISK
Go back and re-read Psalm 72:1-11. When you read how this king rules over those he loves does it seem different to you than what you’ve experienced from people?
Jesus can be trusted. Write down one thing in which you can submit to Jesus’ authority and ask for his loving protection as you do.
To be blessed is to be compassionate.
What sets this king apart from others is his compassion for the plight of those in need. The curse of comfort is one that continually looks to our individual prosperity as the ruler of our lives. We are encouraged to create kingdoms for ourselves—emotionally, physically, and practically. Yes, we are told to feel bad about others being poor, but being moved to the point of compassion is seldom seen.
Bible scholar Craig L. Blomberg writes, “The poor feature directly in thirty-three different Psalms as people in some low position, often weak or socially oppressed. They are to whom God shows special compassion.”2 When we only praise God for what he has given us, we make worship a thank you card instead of a lifestyle of service to others.
Blomberg also notes that a third of the Proverbs (Solomon’s most famous writings) “teach that people get what they deserve, whereas the majority recognize the problem of socio-economic justice.”3 What we do see is a call for those with much to care for those with little.
The “righteous rich”4 are given a clear job to do—give
“One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want. Whoever brings blessing will be enriched, and one who waters will himself be watered” (Prov. 11:24–25).
“Do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it.” (Prov. 3:27).
We see a domino effect between giving and getting here, and the dominos fall toward a specific people group that God especially goes out of his way to help—the poor.
“Whoever oppresses the poor to increase his own wealth, or gives to the rich, will only come to poverty” (Prov. 22:16).
“Whoever closes his ear to the cry of the poor will himself call out and not be answered” (Prov. 21:13).
In modern culture, we are excellent at developing programs to help the poor, and some of those organizations are very, very worthy of your dollars and energy. But when this was written, there weren’t any non-profits you could pick and choose from. They would have no context for ways to help the distant poor person that you’d never sit across the table from.
Compassion is the currency of this king’s kingdom. He spends it on those who are in great need and he asks his subjects to use it as their primary source of investing too. The condition of a compassionate heart is how this king develops blessedness, not the condition of their bank account. DAY 4 | READ |
SPEAK
Do you like the idea of giving to charity or being charitable? What would you say is the difference?
In wealthier parts of the world, it is hard to find need. Where have you found need in your own neighborhood, family or church? In what ways can you meet that need?
RISK
Would you say you are a compassionate person? What does that word mean to you? How can you grow in this area? How have you grown?
Do you notice the needs of others or your own needs most often?
DAY 5 | READ | PSALM 72:15-16
To be blessed is to sacrifice.
In verse 16 we read, “May there be abundance of grain in the land; on the tops of the mountains may it wave; may its fruit be like Lebanon; and may people blossom in the cities like the grass of the field!”
If we read this in light of the covenant law, we see that this is not unlike a description of the blessing the Israelites were told would come from obedience. “And if you faithfully obey the voice of the LORD your God...Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field...The LORD will open to you his good treasury, the heavens, to give the rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hands” (Deut. 28:1–3, 12).
But in order for this type of material and spiritual blessing to be possible, the Israelites had to take part in God’s sacrificial system. We were first introduced to sacrifice by God back in Genesis 1. Remember when he initiated the killing of an innocent animal to re-clothe Adam and Eve? From then on, animal sacrifice was a normative practice that was considered holy and just.
And while there are many sacrificial practices common to the nation of Israel, we are going to focus on three: the daily sacrifice, the evening sacrifice, and the burnt sacrifice. In the briefest of terms, each of these served a unique purpose to shape the soul of an Israelite into a truly blessed person.
A daily sacrifice was a lamb that was sacrificed every single morning as an act of thankfulness for a new day (Dan. 8–9). Psalm 5:3 says, “O LORD, in the morning, you hear my voice; in the morning I prepare a sacrifice for you and watch.”
An evening sacrifice was the exact same thing but at night (Dan. 8:13–14). Let my prayer be counted as incense before you, and the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice, (Ps 141:2).
A burnt sacrifice was how Israel repented of sin (Lev. 1). This was when they took the most valuable animal from their own herds (which was the main source of income and class distinction in those days) and burned it on an altar to God. Psalm 20:3 says, “May he remember all your offerings and regard with favor your burnt sacrifices!”
The curse of comfort tells us to forgo sacrifice of any kind. As a result, we’ve gotten comfortable with how little our sin costs us. We want happiness but we don’t want to have to sacrifice anything to get it. I don’t want to freak you out or anything, but do you know that God still accepts and rejects sacrifices?
“And so, dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him” (Romans 12:1 nlt).
Our very lives; our middle-of-the-week ordinary, everyday choices are the altar on which we offer costly sacrifices to God through Christ. So no, we don’t have to dissect a dove or lamb, but we are called to kill our sin daily with the weapon of confession. This is indicative of the new sacrificial system to come, the one of a self-denying soul.
SPEAK
Are you generous with God? In what ways do you spend your time, resources, money, energy, and emotion on him?
If your generosity seems small towards God in this season, ask God to increase your desire to give more of yourself to him and to others. Write down specific ways you could increase blessing others.
RISK
Do you have a daily practice of confessing sin to God? Do you consider confession to be a blessing or a curse? Share a time confession provided blessing in your life.
Pick one part of your life that isn’t functioning as a “living sacrifice” to God right now and write it down. Ask him to breathe life into that dead place so that you can honor him with the fragrance of sacrifice like Jesus did.
To be blessed is to bless God back.
This portion of Psalm 72 is called a doxology. Doxologies are the ways that a psalmist concludes his song. Doxologies contain two elements: 1) praise to God from a third person perspective and 2) praise for his eternal nature.5 When you speak in the third person you aren’t telling somebody that someone else thinks they are great, you are telling them yourself.
Telling God, “I love you and I praise you” is much more intimate than saying, “God, so-and-so loves you so much I praise you for their love.” A doxology is a great design to end our prayers and praises to God. We end by personally blessing God. We remove the temptation to be a person in the crowd and instead become people up-close.
The second element of praising God for his eternal nature is meant to make us feel small. Sometimes we don’t feel blessed by God because we think our lives are bigger than God’s. Whenever we petition for our needs or praise God for his answers, we should always ask to be “made small” in light of his greatness.
These two things align our heart and our hope with God’s.
All of the Psalms are known to be songs and poems of praise. This is one of the key elements to being a blessed person who experiences happiness, fulfillment and joy: to remember from Whom all good things come.
We should always have this phrase on the tip of our tongues and in the depths of our hearts—“Blessed be the LORD who alone does wondrous things” (Ps. 72:18).
In these final thoughts, Solomon points Israel back to the unconditional covenant God made with them to invite all people into relationship with him.
“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen. 12:2–3).
Through one man named Abraham, the nation of Israel was blessed. Through one king, named Jesus, all people on earth will be blessed.
Blessed be the LORD, the God of Israel, who alone does wondrous things. Blessed be his glorious name forever; may the whole earth be filled with his glory!
Amen and Amen! DAY 6 | READ | PSALM 72:17–20
SPEAK
Do you believe that Jesus is a real king and that the kingdom he came to establish is a real place? Do you ever doubt that you are good enough to be a part of this kingdom?
Do you bless God back like David and Solmon were in the habit of doing? Why do you think this is an important part of being under this kind king’s rule? How does your heart feel when you tell God how blessed you are?
RISK
What is the hardest thing for you to believe about a perfect king and a perfect kingdom? In what ways have you tried to live perfectly instead of living forgiven?
Write out your own doxology to God as a way of blessing him back. Write down whatever the Spirit reveals to you about who God is and who you are in light of his grace and kindness.
DAY 7 | CONFESSION + COMMUNION
Dang guys, I don’t know about you, but I’m really excited for the coming chapters when we get to dive into the New Testament reordering of God’s blessing in our lives! But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Before we get to the King, we must get to confession.
For those who are new to confession, this is simply one of the blessings God gave us when he did away with the sacrificial system. No longer are priests needed to atone for our sins. We can enter into the throneroom of God by confessing sin to each other and to him. This is an incredible step in preparing our hearts to worship Jesus with our whole hearts.
When we have locked doors in our lives that keep God and others out, we can not enter into the freedom of forgiveness. So let’s not be comfortable with our sin and uncomfortable with confession. Let’s reverse the curse of appearing to be perfect and enter into the perfection of communion with Jesus.
Pause and read the verse below.
Think about Jesus being the perfect bread that was broken to feed the whole world.
“And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood’.”
LUKE 22:19-20
SPEAK
Practice confession.
Pray over one another after you confess sin and reclothe each other with these words of encouragement.
“Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones that you have broken rejoice” (Ps. 51:7-8).
“For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. For the Scripture says, ‘Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. For ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’” (Rom. 10:10-11).
“In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing” (James 1:2–4).
RISK
Practice communion.
Once you are ready, dip a piece of bread in wine or juice and thank Jesus for being the one who forgives all without fail.
Scripture Reading
Matthew 5:2–12
CHAPTER 5
were you born in a barn?
GOD BREAKS THE SILENCE
It has been 400 years since we last heard from God.
Ok, well, it’s been 400 years since God last spoke to the nation of Israel.
Between the closing of the Old Testament and the opening of the New Testament, God zipped his lips for four centuries. This is evidence that the nation of Israel had the “mother of all curses” from the Mosaic covenant come upon them— exile. They were displaced from the land God promised them, because of their disobedience. As a result, they entered into a reality that was “synonymous with captivity”.8
I don’t believe those 400 years God was angrily giving Israel the silent treatment, but more so it was a very, very long pause between thoughts. God didn’t send any prophets. He didn’t enter into any new covenants. He didn’t add any more laws. But he did begin a countdown.
That countdown ended when a newborn baby cried in a little town called Bethlehem. In that moment, God broke his silence. As if God had been holding back tears for hundreds of years, he could finally grieve being apart from his people and ask to be held. God drew so close to his people in the humanity of Jesus that he would work and walk among them just like he had in the Garden of Eden.
The long-awaited Messiah had come. The only problem? He wasn’t what anyone was expecting and he didn’t come to do what was expected either.
For starters, he was born in a barn and apparently a tad bit ugly. In an ancient world that was obsessed with appearance, the people who were the most informed on the Messiah’s coming couldn’t see past the ordinary exterior of his entrance. What’s ironic is that they were told by the ancient prophet Isaiah what to expect:
For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
ISAIAH 53:2–3
Why would the God of the universe—the one who painted peacock feathers turquoise, carved snow-capped mountains with a righteous rasp and poured out sparkling oceans with his own two hands—send himself to earth wrapped in a burlap sack? Why would he lay his infant body in a trough where domesticated animals would have eaten their slop? Why would he come unannounced, unseen and unimpressive?
This always catches us off guard as humans. We want God to impress us, but he’s only ever been interested in being with us.
We will see this unfold as we unpack a very famous sermon recorded in the first gospel account of Matthew, called The Beatitudes, which means “supreme blessedness”.
When we open up our Bibles to Matthew 5, we mustn’t assume that Jesus has breezed through his life thus far as the “perfect person,” avoiding all discomfort and struggle simply because he never sinned.
Neither should we approach his words as moralisms to achieve or as steps to becoming better people. We should render them as an extension of Jesus’ biography and respond the way an apprentice under Jesus would: by taking notes. Let’s unpack a little bit about Jesus’ upbringing to understand how his faith was rooted.
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
Jesus had scars before he was ever nailed on the cross. And in fact, if we pay attention to the narrative, we will learn that he had already experienced some pretty ugly things before he was ever persecuted for preaching a word.
As an infant, Herod tried to murder Jesus; as a result, “all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under” were put to
FOCUS BOOK: MATTHEW
Context: Synoptic Gospels
Genre: New Testament Historical Narrative
Original audience: “Different Christian communities in various geographical locations.”1
Author’s intent: “To use a Christ-centered approach that presented a theologically motivated account of the life and work of Jesus and significant events in the life of the early church.”2
NEW STUFF
New Testament Narrative Genre: “Re-presentation of past events for the purpose of instruction.”5 This literary style makes up 60 percent of the New Testament.6
NEW TERMS
Exile - n — “Exile refers to the state of being away from one’s native land and in a foreign land against one’s will. In the Bible, exile describes the displacement of Israel and Judah from the promised land that resulted from breaking their covenant with Yahweh.”3
Blessed (Greek, makarios) adj. — “characterized by happiness and being highly favored (as by divine grace).”4
New Testament Narrative Purpose: “Not merely a record of what happened, but it is also the divine interpretation of what happened.”7
PUT IT IN THE BANK
“Not only that—count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.”
MATTHEW 5:11-12 MSG
death (Matt. 2:16). The political climate Jesus was born into would have been unflinched by infanticide. Herod had already murdered three of his own sons to protect his throne as well.9 Scholars say that around twenty children were killed in Bethlehem according to census, but Jesus, by God’s providence and divine intervention, was not one of them.10
Not exactly a peaceful introduction to the world for Jesus. I wish he could’ve at least had a white noise machine.
Then as a young child, Jesus’ life was marked by repetitive displacement. From Bethlehem to Egypt to Nazareth, Jesus’ family was consistently redirected and uprooted by angels and dreams to keep him safe. When they finally moved to the town of Nazareth in Galilee, they were able to put down roots. But like Matthew says, it was some pretty dry and undesired dirt that the root of Jesus’ life was planted in.
Nazareth was no promised land. In fact, no self-respecting Jew would have lived there. Basically, Jesus grew up on the wrong side of the tracks.11 He was in the neighborhood no one wanted to live in: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:46).
We aren’t given much insight into Jesus’ childhood, so who knows? What we do know is that he was the oldest kid from a different Dad in a blended household. Jesus was raised in a “lower-middle class family”.12 Things were tight. Food was hard-fought. Life wasn’t easy. But, even so, his relationship with God flourished.
In Luke 2:41-52, we read of an account where twelve-year-old Jesus (sneakingly) stayed behind in Jerusalem while his parents traveled back home so he could be near the temple courts. His parents scolded him for running away, and Jesus answered, “Why were you searching for me?” … “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49). Jesus may never have felt quite at home in his own home.
So Jesus grew up in obscurity as an unimpressive guy in a small town. He wasn’t protected from the hard stuff life had to offer. In fact, God’s beloved Son was predestined to endure very uncomfortable things. This is the King. This is the ruler of all. This is the One who came to save. And he wasn’t above the sufferings of this life.
In adulthood, Jesus didn’t get to go to a fancy college to prepare for his MDiv. His vocational ministry preparation was spending forty days in the wilderness with Satan. (Not the professor I’d want.) After being tempted with the best the world had to offer—and not even taking a sip of water or a bite of bread to take the edge off—he gets the reward of angels ministering to him and crystal clear integrity (Matt. 4:11).
JESUS HAD SCARS BEFORE HE WAS EVER NAILED ON THE CROSS.
There was no bucket of ice thrown over his head or fireworks to spell his name in the sky; angels were his accolades. No human was privy to what he had gone through and God wanted it that way for a time. Henri J.M. Nouwen, summarizes the reason this is important in his book, The Wounded Healer: “The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.”
After schooling Satan, Jesus’ rescue mission began. It didn’t begin with oversized scissors and a ribbon cutting ceremony led by a celebrity rabbi—it began with a clinking of prison bars and the slamming of a cell. John the Baptist (the buddy that Jesus used to breakdance with in the womb, Luke 1:41) was taken to prison (Matt. 4:12). Spoiler alert: John never gets out alive. Jesus’ personal grief is the green light that signals his ministry is ready to begin.
The point here is that Jesus was determined to find God in every moment he was given. If we learn anything in this study I hope that it rests on how joyful obedience is the secret code to unlocking a blessed life.
Jesus was the perfect man, but he certainly didn’t have the perfect life. What he did have was a perfectly obedient life.
THE NEW COVENANT KICKS OFF
The reason I ran us through the narrative of Jesus’ upbringing is because we can’t receive the beauty of the New Covenant outside of who Jesus was. Jesus didn’t have the life that most of us are trying to create. Myself included. Jesus was smackdab in the middle of his Father’s will and was not inoculated from personal pain. This truth should help you understand how God could come to earth and preach words that seem anything but heavenly.
When Jesus saw his ministry drawing huge crowds, he climbed a hillside. Those who were apprenticed to him, the committed, climbed with him. Arriving at a quiet place, he sat down and taught his climbing companions. This is what he said:
“You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule.
You’re blessed when you feel you’ve lost what is most dear to you. Only then can you be embraced by the One most dear to you.
You’re blessed when you’re content with just who you are—no more, no less. That’s the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can’t be bought.
You’re blessed when you’ve worked up a good appetite for God. He’s food and drink in the best meal you’ll ever eat.
You’re blessed when you care. At the moment of being ‘care-full,’ you find yourselves cared for.
You’re blessed when you get your inside world—your mind and heart—put right. Then you can see God in the outside world.
You’re blessed when you can show people how to cooperate instead of compete or fight. That’s when you discover who you really are, and your place in God’s family.
You’re blessed when your commitment to God provokes persecution. The persecution drives you even deeper into God’s kingdom.
Not only that—count yourselves blessed every time people put you down or throw you out or speak lies about you to discredit me. What it means is that the truth is too close for comfort and they are uncomfortable. You can be glad when that happens—give a cheer, even!—for though they don’t like it, I do! And all heaven applauds. And know that you are in good company. My prophets and witnesses have always gotten into this kind of trouble.”
MATTHEW 5:1-12, MSG
Jesus re-orders the Old Testament law into the New Testament call. He sets the record straight for what a blessed life truly looks like and it looks nothing like anyone would have ever thought.
The word for blessed that Jesus uses here in Matthew 5 is the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word, esher, which we studied earlier. His use of blessed (makarios) means the same thing that it did in Psalms and Proverbs: “Characterized by happiness and being highly favored (as by divine grace).”13
Jesus isn’t saying, “Bummed are those who mourn. Bummed are those who are poor. Bummed are those who are merciful. But they should be happy anyway!” He is saying that those are the very things which make them the happiest people around. How can that be?
A life lived in complete devotion to a man who spoke such words is the only way to experience the blessed life this side of the cross.
In the first part of this study, we defined the curse of comfort as “an unfounded expectation of ease that becomes an illusion of control.” Control is only an illusion. Jesus is offering us reprieve from the manufactured mirage through his truth of holy trouble. In this teaching, we discover we’ve been blessed beyond measure because Jesus assigns meaning to the mess of our lives. But he doesn’t take the
JOYFUL OBEDIENCE IS THE SECRET CODE TO UNLOCKING A BLESSED LIFE.
mess away.
Let’s pause. Doesn’t this version of blessing sound different than anything we’ve studied so far? Why is that?
Jesus began his ministry in the book of Matthew by dismantling the Old Covenant mechanisms of actions and outcomes. This is because when the Old Testament closed, we were told that “Israel had no king” (Judg. 21:25). The nation was spiraling into chaos because of their disobedience. They were stuck in their own sin and couldn’t get out. Unlike a dictator god who would just let them drown, God wraps himself in flesh and comes to rescue them.
A part of Jesus’ mission was to reconstruct the Old Testament “cycles of reward for blessing and punishment for disobedience.” Not to do away with obedience and disobedience, because that is the swinging door of spiritual growth or spiritual death for the Christ follower. But to take the very same tools that built God’s blessing in the first place and use them to reconstruct a faith where all outcomes are blessed for the one who believes in Jesus.
This is an important piece of the biblical blessing puzzle.
Jesus is opening up the door for all to enter into the kingdom of God, but the narrative has deliberately and clearly moved from a “blessing on your barns” (Deut. 28:8) to a Blessing born in a barn (Luke 2:12).
WHAT THE CURSE?
One prominent thing is missing from the Beatitudes reordering of blessing: the curses. In the Old Testament, blessings and curses are usually attached in some way (Deut. 28). The Beatitudes, however, address something deeper than good behavior and bad behavior. They address the state of the heart. In the New Covenant, exile is no longer a place on a map, but determined by the condition of one’s soul.
As Christians living in a post-Christian culture there is a lot of sin running around being called a blessing. And a lot of blessing running around being called a curse. If you follow Jesus, there will be times when culture calls your blessing a curse and your curses a blessing. Jesus is giving us words to ease that tension and help us tease apart the two.
Is what’s happening in your life developing contentedness in Christ? Are you experiencing more and more peace with all people? Are you developing a deeper gratitude for his glory? Do you notice a desperate need for more of God and his presence? If so, you’re blessed. In the New Covenant, circumstances are
only accessories to the development of one’s devotion to Jesus, not the result of it.
Humans love to look to circumstances, tax brackets, car makes and models, the size of our houses and families to determine if God is pleased with us. But Jesus clearly points out that God has an unyielding obsession with the inner workings of our heart. He doesn’t give us goodie bags for coming to the party, he asks us to dump our goodie bags on the table and use what we find to bless others.
Some of us have ignored the interior obedience of our souls, because the exterior of our lives looks blessed. We must confess that sometimes we track our outward blessings to see if we’re earning our keep in the kingdom of God. But that’s not how it works with Jesus. Under his rule, earning and obedience are different. Earning collects circumstances that serve us. Obedience collects circumstances that serve Jesus and others.
Jesus clearly lays out how a New Covenant believer experiences the blessed life, but it often gets clouded because we give circumstances more control than Christ.
Jesus flips the blessed script when he says, happy are the ones who are emptied of themselves. Happy are the ones who genuinely care about others more than themselves. Happy are the ones who let God into their inner thought life so he can tediously tinker with their tendencies. Happy are the ones who sell their stuff because they’re desperate to see God’s face.
Happy are the ones who love the people from the wrong side of the tracks. Happy are the ones who know they are actually the ones from the wrong side of the tracks. Happy are the ones who don’t backbite and cut down other Christians. Happy are the ones who let God have control of every single area of their life.
Happy are the poor in spirit and in wallet. Happy are those who’ve lost something dear to them. Happy are those without guile, agenda, or pride. Happy are those whose bellies rumble for righteousness. Happy are those who forgive others without keeping some resentment in their fanny pack. Happy are those who know how jacked up they are and enter into confession often. Happy are those who design patterns of peacemaking in all they do. Happy are those who are willing to be torn down so the kingdom of God can be built up.
And, yes. Cursed are those who edge God out of their lives in order to keep up the appearance of ease under the illusion of control. Cursed are those who build their lives within the security and safety of stuff. Cursed are those who keep, accumulate, profit and protect assets. Cursed are those that avoid pain at all costs.
Cursed are those who fight for a version of an angry, racist gospel that keeps God’s beloved out. Cursed are those who pick costly fights to rack up pennies of pride. Cursed are those who build their lives around self-righteousness instead of self-forgetfulness. Cursed are those who don’t need Jesus because they’ve met every single one of their own needs. Cursed are those who eat their fill and ignore the empty eyes of others. Cursed are those who call Jesus the ‘Christ’ and crucify him with their dulled nails of narcissism. Cursed are those who hang crosses on their walls but don’t pick up their own.
Jesus’ most famous sermon wasn’t on evangelism, getting into heaven, doing all the right things, or even having educated answers. It wasn’t about how to get God to do what you want or to protect you from what you don’t want. Jesus’ words were about being blessed in all things, not just the easy things. They were about how to call the things that are a tad bit ugly the most beautiful gifts this world has ever seen.
Culture says: Only pretty things are blessed things. Scripture says: All things are blessed things.
READ Matthew 5:3-5
Which of these do you most identify with: poor in spirit, those who mourn, or the meek?
What are the blessings attached to each of those? (Hint: they come after the words, “for theirs” or “for they”).
Do you find Jesus’ words to be true? Why or why not?
SPEAK
Read aloud Matthew 5:6-9
Which of these do you most identify with: those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, or the peacemakers?
What are the blessings attached to each of those? (Same hint: they come after the words, “for theirs” or “for they”).
Do you find Jesus’ words to be true? Why or why not?
RISK
Meditate on Matthew 5:10-11
What do you think it means to be persecuted for righteousness sake? Have you ever experienced this?
Jesus says we are to “rejoice and be glad” when people revile us because of our faith in him. That word in Greek means to be “harshly criticized”. How do you handle criticism of your faith?
Pick one life circumstance that was out of your control. Ask God to reveal to you how he blessed you during that time and make a list of those blessings to share.
Scripture Reading
Exodus 3:1-6
Deut. 6:4-5
Matthew 22:23-40
(Optional reading: Mark 12:18-34, Luke 10:25-37, Luke 20:27-38)
that’s so synoptic
THE WORLD’S LONGEST AND MOST HOLY TECHNO SONG
My husband likes techno music. I don’t.
There is something about hearing the same beat over and over and over that makes me want to pull my eyelashes out. But when trying to explain what makes the Synoptic Gospels so important to the story of Jesus, I realized it’s because they are like the world’s longest and most holy techno song.
The Synoptic Gospels are New Testament narrative on repeat. Similar to interpretive style in Old Testament narrative, these books tell us the story of what happened while Jesus was on earth by repeating some of the main points so we don’t miss it. Another similarity the synoptics have with techno music is that much of what is repeated isn’t brand new material.
Jesus quotes from the Old Testament many times in his New Testament teachings. He quotes from all portions of the canon: the Law (the first five books of the OT), the Prophets (books that announced his coming) and books like Psalms (poetry) and Daniel (prophetic). This chapter we are going to focus on a few verses that Jesus quoted from the Law in each of the synoptics pertinent to being blessed in the New Covenant era.
But before we do, let’s talk synoptic specifics. What books are we talking about here? Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
John is not considered synoptic, because he marches to the beat of his own drum (he probably hated techno too.) His gospel shares less commonality with the other three and was written much later. It is nonetheless filled with some of
the most famous and often quoted pieces of scripture. And in fact, our synoptic step-brother John said, “Now there are also many other things that Jesus did. Were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:25).
The New Testament is divinely inspired by God and written by human hands. Collectively, the books we have in the NT canon are proof that it would take multiple authors, multiple audiences and multiple perspectives to capture all of who Jesus was to the nation of Israel and to us. And even that couldn’t capture it all.
So how similar are the Synoptic Gospels?
Thematically. They all say that Jesus is the long awaited Messiah. That he is the Son of God. That he is the ultimate sacrifice who came to take away the sins of the world. That he was the fulfillment of the Old Covenant and the giver of the New Covenant. They tell us of his virgin birth, his rise from obscurity to fame throughout the region, his power to heal the sick, the blind, the lame and the lonely. They tell us what the world has been waiting to hear ever since Eden closed its doors. He’s here. He’s finally here.
Linguistically. Matthew shares 250 verses with Luke, Luke shares 380 verses with Mark and Mark shares a whopping 500 verses with Matthew.9 The reason that we will spend time studying specific Old Testament “Law” verses that Jesus quoted in the trifecta of the synoptics is because Jesus was a rabbi and very familiar with the Hebrew Bible. He didn’t randomly pick these verses to impress his buddies. He knew the deeper meanings of these truths well beyond what any human ever had.
If these passages from the Law were important enough to be repeated by the Son of God and individually recorded in each synoptic gospel, I’m willing to bet they’re worth spending our time on too. So we will look at a couple of them over and over and over and over. Drop the beat. Over and over and over.
Ok, you get it. Let’s go.
BURN, BABY, BURN
Who is Jesus talking to in this chapter’s passages? Two different groups of people. The first group is the Sadducees and the second is the Pharisees.
Let’s zoom in on his first audience, the Sadducees. They were scripture memorizing, temple-going, well-respected, religious leaders of his day. He’s also talking to anyone who reads their Bibles, goes to church, and yet still somehow miss the power of enjoying God in their actual lives.
FOCUS BOOK: MATTHEW
Context: Synoptic Gospels
Genre: New Testament Historical Narrative Original audience: “Different Christian communities in various geographical locations.”1
Author’s intent: “To use a Christ-centered approach that presented a theologically motivated account of the life and work of Jesus and significant events in the life of the early church.”2
NEW STUFF
New Testament Narrative Genre: “Re-presentation of past events for the purpose of instruction.”6 This literary style makes up 60 percent of the New Testament.7
New Testament Narrative Purpose: “Not merely a record of what happened, but it is also the divine interpretation of what happened.”8
NEW TERMS
Synoptic - adj. — “Term applied to Matthew, Mark, and Luke because they see the ministry of Jesus from generally the same point of view, which is quite different from that of the Gospel of John.”3
Sadducee - n. — “One of the major groups constituting Palestinian Judaism in the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods.”4
Pharisee - n. — “The scribes and Pharisees are presented as the pious and zealous official representatives of Judaism whose practice and interpretation of the Bible are contrasted with Jesus’ interpretation of biblical law.”5
PUT IT IN THE BANK
“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your hearts.”
DEUT. 6:5-6
But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob?’ He is not God of the dead, but of the living.’”
Matthew 22:29-32
You are wrong. Jesus cracks me up. But what in the world is going on here? Let’s go back before we go forward.
Jesus quotes Exodus 3:6 in this passage. In its original context, that verse was how God revealed himself to Moses—the author of the Mosaic Law. On that day, Moses was minding his own business and keeping his flock for his father-in-law. Then God threw a match of his majesty on a flammable bush in the middle of a middle eastern desert. Only a God who is ever in complete control would flick a cigarette from heaven into the humble hotlands of earth.
When Moses gets curious about the bush that’s on fire (an incredibly dangerous element in his regular routine), the Bible says he turns aside, which is translated, “to change orientation or direction”.10 Moses breaks routine. He does something different. He doesn’t stay the course just because he usually does. He has left enough room in his plan for an impossibility to take place. Moses did something unsafe and unexpected and was rewarded by the presence of God in doing so.
And then from the bush, God says, “I am the God of your Father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Ex. 3:6).
Why does Jesus repeat this mini-genealogy to the Sadducees?
Well, Jesus is using this first and foremost as a declaration of eternal life. God is, not was, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Also, the three men God names were the recipients of the unconditional covenant God made with Abraham, through whom, “all nations will be blessed” (Gen. 22:18).
When Jesus ropes this Old Covenant reference into a strange conversation about resurrection and remarriage, it can seem unrelated at first. But Jesus is just doing what his Father does—adding a “dangerous” element to the routine of religion.
In short, this reference to Moses combined with Jesus’ insight into heaven is an admonishment of the Sadducee doctrine. The Sadducees were an offshoot of Judaism that did not believe there was life after death. They simply believed there was a God, you were born, you died, and that was it. Today, we call these people fatalists. And often fatalists convert to consumerism in an impossible
MOSES DID SOMETHING UNSAFE AND UNEXPECTED AND WAS REWARDED BY THE PRESENCE OF GOD
attempt to fill the space of eternity with immediacy.
We aren’t exempt from that temptation either.
Jesus is giving a firm warning for Christians in a post-Christian culture too. Culture calls the Saduccidic contempt for the eternal, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). In Matthew 22, Jesus simply called it wrong when he said, “...you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.” When you don’t value (or even believe) in eternity, it’s pretty easy to fill up your dollar store mug with right now and call that enough.
I’ll be honest, I deal with my inner fatalist at some point every day.
How is it that I think anything in this temporary life can fill the eternal space of God’s presence in my soul? Why do I constantly battle thoughts that something out there can out-bless what’s already in here? When a believer settles for anything less than forever, then off-brand blessing sneaks into our shopping cart and we tell ourselves we found a good deal.
A part of this problem comes from the cultural theology of our day. From social media, to podcasters, to some of our favorite Christian authors, we are told to be “in the present” all the time. But, we need to be careful that a good thing doesn’t become a God thing. Yes, we need to be constantly seeking the presence of God in every moment, but are we worshipping the gods of immediacy over the God of eternity?
Madeleine L’Engle writes, “We look into outer space and because we can not “see” a God we can touch, a God we can comprehend with our rational intellect, we invent new gods to take his place, all the little gods of technocracy, little gods who have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, hands and touch not, and who have nothing to say to us in our times of deepest need.”
Sometimes reversing the curse of comfort means booting the gods of immediacy and getting comfortable with our mortality. That was the whole point of the Mosaic Law in the first place: to introduce idol-obsessed humans to something beyond their temporary state; to give them access to a God who was eternal.
Like Jesus said in Mark 12:27, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” Ever since Adam and Eve unplugged our souls from the lifeline of a sinless existence back in the garden, death has become our deepest need. (You won’t see that on a greeting card.) However, only through the death of our old selves are we introduced to eternal life. The death of our illusions. Death of our pride. Death of our better ideas. Death of our self-righteousness. Death of our selfinterest.
Jesus astonished people all the time when he walked the earth. More than a dozen times in the gospels we read that the crowds and the disciples were “utterly amazed” at his teachings. This word comes from the Greek, ekplēssō and means, “to be or become astounded to such a degree as to nearly lose one’s mental composure.”11
Jesus made people crazy. So maybe he is like a techno song after all.
THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME
After Jesus dealt with the Sadducee’s disbelief in eternity, he is challenged by a different sect of Judaism in his day—the Pharisees. The Pharisees believed in eternity. In fact, they believed in it so much that they added a couple extra bajillion things to the law to ensure a corner on the heavenly market.
These folks had immense knowledge about the blessings and curses upon which the law was built, and so they asked Jesus this question: “Which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” And Jesus replies, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matt. 22:37).
As we know from our study on the covenant, there were over 600 laws in the Mosaic Law. I’ll be honest, I’d be begging for cliffnotes from Jesus too. But, alas, Jesus isn’t one for religious Olympics and so he simplifies it a bit both for the Pharisees and us. He folds up all of their hard-earned and personally developed know-how into a couple of sentences: love God and love all people.
Let’s not forget how this fits into the storyline of being blessed by God.
At this time in history, the people questioning him had come to understand that blessing was only possible through obedience to the law. The Old Testament scripture Jesus quoted is found in Deuteronomy 6:4-5, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
In Judaism, this section of scripture was known as the shema. It was recited “morning and evening” by devout Jews.12 It asserted the basis of Jewish faith. It was the calling card of the law-following, covenant-keeping person. They would have been incredibly familiar with this commandment. Jesus isn’t telling them anything new. He is telling them something very old in a new way.
On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.
SOMETIMES REVERSING THE CURSE OF COMFORT MEANS BOOTING THE GODS OF IMMEDIACY.
The nation of Israel had been waiting to hear from God for 400 years and the Pharisees weren’t convinced that Jesus had the authority to speak on his behalf. Perhaps the Pharisees were waiting for God to give them some new laws, new rules, or new ways to exercise control over others. Perhaps they wanted increased power over people and instead, God hands them a big old bag of compassion in the words of Jesus Christ.
This stops them in their self-righteous tracks and they are silenced (Matt. 22:46).
You would think the Pharisees would be jumping up and down to hear someone teach love and freedom as the new mechanisms for meaning in their lives. Well, the Pharisees didn’t love God, they loved being right. They were willing to jump through the holy hoops they had been accustomed to because it bolstered their pride and upheld their piousness. The law served them. But the love Jesus spoke of? It served God and others.
Notice the response of one woke Pharisee to Jesus’ teaching in Mark, And the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher. You have truly said that he is one, and there is no other besides him. And to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” And when Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
MARK 12:32-34
Remember the sacrifices and burnt offerings we learned about in Psalm 72? This scribe was beginning to understand that the sacrificial system was changing. And in doing so, he demonstrated one of the ways in which animal sacrifices were giving way to becoming living sacrifices: follow the dangerous detour of Jesus’ love like Moses did and change direction.
The Bible calls this repentance (Matt. 3:1), which is a change of heart, of mind, and of action.
When was the last time you put down your measuring stick for everyone’s morality and said out loud, “You are right Teacher. You are right and I am wrong.”
A SADDUCEE AND A PHARISEE WALK INTO A HIGHER BAR
I’ve said it before and I am going to say it again. The lie must be dismantled that Jesus was in any way shape or form eagerly awaiting his death on a cross so we wouldn’t have to be inconvenienced by God’s high standards anymore. Jesus went to the cross so that we could be capable of an even higher standard of obedience than the law required: one rooted in self-denial, not-self love. This is
the surprising, upside-down and overflowing way to become blessed.
Dallas Willard explains this in The Divine Conspiracy:
“[The Pharisees] wanted to add obedience to ritual law to faith in Christ, we want to subtract moral law from faith in Christ. How to combine faith with obedience is surely the essential task of the church—”.
If the essential task of the church today is how to combine faith and obedience, we must put “The Greatest Commandment” into actual practice. It is the absolute apex of what it means to raise our standard of faith to that of Jesus.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
MATTHEW 22:37-39
Some of us say we love God with every part of us, but still only love our Christian “neighbors”, or our close family “neighbors” or our sober “neighbors” or our safe “neighbors”. In Luke’s account of “The Greatest Commandment”, we read about a lawyer in the crowd who had a watered-down version of loving his neighbors too.
“Desiring to justify himself, [the lawyer] said to Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’”
Luke 10:29
Jesus’ response can be summarized as this—to whomever you can show compassion. One way to combine faith and obedience is to actively love those we are trying to “justify ourselves” out of loving. The hardest part of that? To admit that we have pride, bias, prejudice, distrust, and fear embedded in our questions about who our neighbors are.
Jesus lovingly knocked the lawyer’s pride to the floor when he responded with a parable about The Good Samaritan as the neighbor he must love. Who were the Samaritans? They were of both Jewish and Gentile descent, which made them “unclean” and unsuitable for shared community. They were racially and spiritually profiled as less valuable than other people.
Jesus told the story not to shame the lawyer, but to empower him to pick up the oppressed people of his day. Ask God who your “Samaritan” neighbor is and I guarantee you’ll be pretty taken aback at who he puts on your heart as well.
So what did we learn about blessing this chapter? Jesus’ encounter with the Sadducees revealed that we won’t experience blessing if we fail to regularly
consider eternity over the comforts of today. And we will also miss blessing in a Pharisaical lifestyle of applauding ourselves for our strict adherence to selfinflicted rules. Contrarily, we learned through the lawyer’s question that blessing comes when we offer our love to those we’d rather just avoid.
To reverse the curse of comfort we must ask better questions than the Sadducees, the Pharisees, and the lawyer. The Sadducees asked questions to disprove God’s eternal authority. The Pharisees asked questions to disprove Jesus’ messianic authority. And the lawyer asked questions to become the only authority there was in his life.
Instead, we should ask questions like the rich young ruler.
“Just then a man came up to Jesus and asked, ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life? What do I still lack?’” (Matt. 19:16-22; Mark 10:17; Luke 18:22, emphasis added).
If you are familiar with this story in the Bible, you may know that Jesus’ answer was to sell all of his possessions and give them to the poor so he would be able to follow him. We can not follow Jesus when we are hindered by the wrong questions. Some of us are asking God questions about blessings that haven’t come instead of asking God questions about who we haven’t blessed yet.
We must not repeat the Israelite’s mistake when they wandered in the wilderness complaining about what they lacked because they were focused on their unsatisfied appetites. We must raise the bar of obedience above religious routine and implore the poorest parts of our hearts, What do I lack? What do I sell? What do I give? What do I change? What do I lay down? What do I do to be more like You, Jesus?
Because in those answers true blessedness is discovered. So as much as I don’t like techno music, the beat of my heart should always be, What do I lack? What do I lack? What do I lack? And the response will always be, love, love, love, love, love.
READ
Matthew 23:2-4
Culture says: To be blessed is to love yourself. Scripture says: To be blessed is to love others more than yourself.
Jesus warns against not practicing what we preach. Have you ever felt burdened by someone’s expectations of you? What were those expectations? Have you ever burdened others in a similar way?
How do you think we can be people who bear each other’s burdens instead of “lay them on people’s shoulders”?
Share a story about someone who has been a blessing to you by practicing what they preach.
SPEAK
Read aloud Matthew 19:16-22
Why do you think the rich young ruler had a nagging sense he was lacking something if he’d truly done everything right?
What action steps did Jesus say he that would enable him to be perfect (made complete) in verse 21?
Why do you think “go”, “sell”, “give” and “follow” were the requirements he gave? What heart issues do those commands deal with? Which one of those commands do you struggle with most?
RISK
Meditate on Matthew 22:37-39
Jesus folds up over 600 laws in the Law to fit into two. Write down at least one way that you love the Lord your God with all your 1) heart 2) soul and 3) mind.
Why do you think loving our neighbor is synonymous with loving God?
Write down specific examples of who you think your neighbor is and share them with the group. Pray for one another and ask God to help you create opportunities to love those neighbors.
Scripture Reading
Matthew 13:10-17
Mark 4:10-12
Luke 8:9-10
CHAPTER 7
kings of the stone age
BLIND AS A BAT, CLEAR AS A BELL
I love my oldest son with the fiercest of loves, but whenever he tries to find something that’s right in front of him I seriously wonder if he has vision problems. I would like to say this isn’t hereditary—but my husband can become greatly frustrated by his inability to find something that is directly in front of him too. “Where’s the mayonnaise?” has become a running joke in our house.
And me? I am the queen of looking for something that will never been found in my house: quiet. Raising three young kids is a lifelong program in the art of appreciating chaos. I often opt out of that program and opt into impatience and pouting instead.
We’re all a little lost when it comes to finding what we are looking for aren’t we?
When things are not easy to find, they frustrate us. Common to our culture, if something isn’t obvious we believe it isn’t worth the time it takes to uncover it. If something doesn’t come easy, then how can it make us happy? This is why it’s important to spend time not just reading our Bibles, but asking questions of it. What does this mean? What is hidden from my point of view? What am I missing? Why does this confuse me?
In the Bible, the economy of the secret and hidden is of very high value. So much so, that Jesus spent a large chunk of his teaching telling stories called parables. Parables were designed to hide heavenly kingdom truths from earth-minded folks.
Why on earth would he do that?
As we trace the biography of Jesus’ life further along in the New Testament narrative, we see that crowds start becoming a large part of Jesus’ audience. While Jesus came to be the light of the whole world, he didn’t come to be a world-class performer. He was committed to his Father’s will in training disciples in the way of the new kingdom he came to establish. But when the crowds grew increasingly interested in a performance or a “word” from Jesus, he wasn’t willing to meet that want.
At the same time, religious leaders like the Pharisees (scribes) and Sadducees became more and more angry and combative against the mission of Jesus. His plainspeak was causing all sorts of tension in the orthodox order and things were getting dicey. They wanted to remain kings of the stone age while Jesus was committed to introducing a new age.
So around Matthew 13, Jesus starts teaching in parables which is something he had not yet done in his ministry. The word parable is a combination of the Greek words, para and ballō, “which together mean ‘to throw alongside.’ A parable, like an illustration, makes a comparison between a known truth and an unknown truth.”8
Another reason Jesus altered his teaching style from “easy to understand” to “harder to follow,” is because the Messiah was prophesied to recover the sight of blind bats through the clear bell of his teaching.
All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable. This was to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet: “I will open my mouth in parables; I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world.”
MATTHEW 13:34-35
When parables started becoming a staple in Jesus’ teaching, the crowds and critics were deflated. Instead of gaining access to Jesus’ juicy discipleship training, they got off-the-wall stories about farming, sheep, pearls and fishing nets. When Jesus told the parable of the wheat and weeds, I wonder if people went home thinking he was a wackadoo farmer who had no clue how to keep his crops from being contaminated.
However, when the crowds and critics were out of earshot, Jesus would privately unpack parables like the life-giving lunch they were. Little by little, parables revealed what he was up to, who he truly was, and what that meant for the entire world.
FOCUS BOOK: MATTHEW
Context: Synoptic Gospels
Genre: New Testament Historical Narrative Original audience: “Different Christian communities in various geographical locations.”1
Author’s intent: “To use a Christ-centered approach that presented a theologically motivated account of the life and work of Jesus and significant events in the life of the early church.”2
NEW STUFF
Purpose of parables: “An illustration, makes a comparison between a known truth and an unknown truth; it throws them alongside each other.”7
NEW TERMS
Parable - n. — a figurative narrative in which the duties of men or the spiritual matters of God are portrayed (in a simple and often rustic manner); especially concerning the nature and history of God’s kingdom.3
Gentiles - n. — a person of a non-Jewish nation or of non-Jewish faith, especially a Christian as distinguished from a Jew.4
Privileged (cultural) - adj. — having special rights, advantages, or immunities.5
Privileged (biblical) - adj. — The blessing of hearing and seeing Jesus in your life.
Kingdom of God - n. — the domain ruled by God as the sovereign king.6
PUT IT IN THE BANK
At that time Jesus declared, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
MATTHEW 11:25-27
“At that time Jesus declared, ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will’.”
MATTHEW 11:25-26
The kingdom of heaven was a mystery to the very smart as well as the overstimulated. The critics were looking for faults and the crowds were fatigued by the complexities. Conversely, the kids? The little children in the faith? Jesus’ disciples? They received Jesus’ oddities with joyful confusion. Why, Jesus? Why? Why? Why? Why?
In Matthew 13:11,16-17 he tells them,
“To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given...But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear. For truly, I say to you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it” (emphasis mine).
The disciples were just beginning to get this—one puzzling parable at a time. One commentator explained how rich the gift of discipleship to the physical person of Jesus was: “The disciples are thus privileged (blessed = to be congratulated).”9
Our culture tells us that we are only privileged when we are given special treatment. The Bible tells us that we are only privileged when we are given special revelation.
To be blessed in the New Covenant is the invaluable reward of hearing and seeing Jesus for who he is, the very Messiah that Moses, Abraham, David, Jeremiah, and Isaiah longed to see. Parables were not privileged information for the select few, it was privileged information for the faithful few.
And those faithful few are still hearing and seeing Jesus to this day. How do I know that? Because here you are.
A REAL EYE OPENER
So how often did Jesus speak in parables? One-third of the time.10 Parables often have several meanings within one story. They are meant to open the ears and the eyes of those who are willing to be taught.
In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus goes through a series of circumstances in which the seed of his truth doesn’t take.
A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell
along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.
MATTHEW 13:3-8
Busy people building their own kingdoms? Birds will snatch the seed. Inauthentic people with shallow roots? Life’s stresses will kill the seed. Worried people controlled by their own comfort? Fear of lack will choke the seed. But discerning people? God-dependent people? Self-denying people?
“...the one who hears the word and understands it. He indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”
MATTHEW 13:23
The people who hear God’s word and commit to shoveling through their own crud to get to the core truths of what Jesus says will bear fruit. Those seeds will have the outcome of an invested life.
Will they be frustrated at times? Yes. Will they forget what they’ve already been told? Sure. Will they fall down in the same place time and time again? You bet. Will they take a wrong turn? Absolutely. But in this process, (because discipleship to Jesus is always a process), our frustrations will transform into a firm foundation of faith.
Our scattered minds will become anchored deeper in gospel truths. Our scraped knees will become soothing bandages for others who’ve fallen in the same ditches. Our wrong turns will become redirectives for redemption.
Once we get the seed sown, then what? Matthew writes about this in The Parable of the Hidden Treasure and The Pearl of Great Value.
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.”
MATTHEW 13:44
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”
MATTHEW 13:45
One person had to invest and another had to divest. One had to build something
from nothing and another had to build something completely brand new. One is the infant in the faith—the Gentiles. And the other is the established merchant— the nation of Israel.
In the historical cultural context of Jesus’ time, God was overjoyed at the prospect of Israel finding Jesus as the Messiah hidden in the ground of the earth he had given them. “Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine” (Ex. 19:5). But they used their shovel to bury the body of Jesus instead of build his church. And let’s be honest, we easily could have gripped the handle right alongside them.
The theme of selling which we observed last chapter from the rich young ruler continues in these short parables. “Then in his joy he goes and sells all,” and [he] “went and sold all he had and bought it” (Matt 13:44–45). There is a selling off that takes place in the life of someone who has found Jesus. It’s pretty easy to spot the real estate signs in the yard of one’s heart who has found themselves fully committed to the Treasure of great price.
One easily recognizable sign is that those who’ve “sold all” to invest in Jesus won’t follow the crowd or the critics. Instead, their entire motivation and momentum in life will be tethered to the personhood of Jesus. There will be an attractive absence of worldly concern when you’re around them, but don’t be fooled, it has come at great personal cost. This “selling off” will look different for each one of us.
For me, I sold off my stake in wanting to be famous. (I know, I know, it’s embarrassing.) I sold off the parcel of trying to be perfect. I sold off the longing to be wealthy. I sold off the need to be noticed. I sold off self-promoting and embraced a quiet life of listening to Jesus. I sold off sexual sin and the support it required from a dependency on alcohol and autonomy. I sold off islands of self-investment and bought acres and acres of accountability, community and intimacy with Christ and his people.
To sell off all I had cost me my hidden secrets. I think that’s why Jesus is always talking about searching and seeking for hidden treasure. If you dig into him, you can’t help but bury your old self.
HEAVY TALENT + BURIED BODIES
The curse of comfort would rather just uncover the treasure of Jesus, apply his principles, and invest in building a nice life with a decent privacy fence. But what Jesus lived and died for was a costly new kingdom that isn’t built upwards, it reaches outwards. It is a kingdom whose walls no longer segregate status and privilege from the socially strange and the chronically overlooked. Jesus, in his
IN THIS PROCESS, (BECAUSE DISCIPLESHIP TO JESUS IS ALWAYS A PROCESS), OUR FRUSTRATIONS WILL TRANSFORM INTO A FIRM FOUNDATION OF FAITH.
life and in his teachings, set the example for us to enter into a new way of living— together.
In Matthew 25:14-30, Jesus keeps rolling out parables about selling off and costly investments in his kingdom. In this passage there is a parable about a wealthy investor and three different servants that he entrusts portions of his fortune too. The first servant reinvests and turns the biggest profit. The second servant invests and turns a profit too. But the third servant doesn’t invest. Instead, he creates a cavern for comfort and plunks his talent deep inside.
The word that is used for money in this parable is talent. A talent was a huge piece of silver that could weigh up to 80 pounds.11 It was given to each person dependent upon their ability. The richest man wasn’t given more because he was a better person, it was because he was a heavier lifter. The poorest man wasn’t given the least because he was a bad person, it was because God wanted him to lift a lighter load.
I’m not sure what the lightest lifter was thinking while he was waiting for the investor to come back. Maybe he was telling himself he didn’t know anything about investments. Maybe he was convinced it was holier to protect than to build. Maybe he was worried he was going to lose it or make another mess of things. I’m not sure why he buried his talent, but I’m certain it was motivated by lies he’d believed about the investor and about himself.
When it comes to God-given talents we either think way too much of ourselves or far too little.
God gives each of us talents, burdens, weights, and circumstances that are divinely assigned. Different weights, different rewards. To serve Jesus is to uncover the talents we’ve been given to do the lifting work of building his church.
Whoa. Wait? Church? Aren’t we talking about building blessed lives? What does the church have to do with that? Isn’t the church just an institution, a club, or an outdated version of an old idea? Isn’t it really just a denominational jungle gym of pretenders and Pollyannas?
It can be those things, but God intended for it to be a collection of outsiders who belong to one another. It was intended to be a community of heavy and light lifters who bore each other’s burdens as best they could. As author and pastor Michael Lawrence writes, “The church is to be a display of the gospel, a living, breathing, growing colony of heaven.”12
To God, the church was worth killing the Perfect Person for. It was his dream for the fulfillment of the Old Covenant. It was his design for dwelling among his
of hope. The church was God’s answer for the wandering soul looking for refuge and reprieve. It was the way he planned to recover sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf.
How did Jesus explain what the church should look like?
Well, aspects of it are explained in parables about a field, a party, a wedding, a mustard seed and leavening yeast. But one of the most telling and strange depictions is the Parable of the Dishonest Manager (Luke 16:1-13). In it, Jesus uses a really bad example to tell us how to do a really good thing. The star of the story is someone who is commended for his shrewdness in scamming people who owed money to his master in order to get that money for himself.
Yeah, I wasn’t sure at first either. But Luke 16:11 unlocks a little bit of its hidden truth: “If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?”
Nothing that we gain in this world, through our own hard work, is truly ours. We are only stewards of what God has entrusted to us. We are all trying to figure out how to use the gifts we’ve been given to either support our side hustle or to invest in God’s mission.
This parable is about how to be stewards of God’s blessing, be it spiritual, emotional or material. In the Parable of the Dishonest Manager, the rich man’s response to being fired was, “I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg” (Luke 16:3). From this place of pride, he hatches a plan to recover some of the wealth he wasted while still employed.
One commentary said of this passage, “Jesus was saying that one is to use wealth, not store it up or be a servant of it. Wealth should be a disciple’s servant, not vice versa.”13 We are to use wealth. We are to use talents. We are to use what we’ve been given. We are not to be debtors to God in soul and in dollars.
Strange as it may seem, the dishonest manager was commended because he took action. He did something to improve his situation, even if it wasn’t the right thing or for the right reasons. Friend, you might get it wrong too. But as a community of believers if we do nothing to recover the time or resources we’ve wasted we will miss out on being valuable contributors to the church that Christ called us to be.
We are to invest in the kingdom by using the wealth we’ve been given wisely. If you are not in a season of material wealth, I am sure you have a wealth of resources God has given you. Jesus commends using such provision to throw parties for the impoverished kids; to help all kinds of people with all sorts of
people. It was where he would equip his people to be sent out as ambassadors things they need; to spend it on necessary things that empower community and create belonging.
We are encouraged to build houses and invite people into them. To rent out rooms in our revenue to anyone who has need. We are not to hide. Not to shield. Not to keep up. Not to lock out. We are to provide people opportunity. We are not to stand by. To bury. To shrink. To disengage.
This is how we build a wealthy church in the kingdom of God: we invest in the orphaned children, the impoverished widow, the drug-ridden neighborhood. We speak out against racism by loving the outsider, and engaging with the socially tossed aside. We pick up the tab of promise in the way of forgiveness and inclusion. We pay our way by being joyful contriubtors to the people with whom we share our boardrooms, bedrooms, living rooms and Sunday school rooms.
We sing together, serve together, grieve together, come together, throw alongside together.
So what does one find in the field they bought with everything they sold off?
A shovel-dependent, sweat inducing, back-breaking, grace-soaked, breathing hard, laughing out loud, getting tired but using our talents anyway, Church.
Like Jesus hinted at, if it’s hard to find, then it’s worth digging deep for.
Culture says: Blessing should be easy to find. Scripture says: Blessing is hidden from the world.
READ
Matthew 13:31-32
What does Jesus say the kingdom of heaven is like?
What is the first thing required of the man? (Hint: it’s one word). What is the second thing? How does a farmer “sow” a seed?
Why do you think the kingdom of heaven is like the “smallest of all seeds” buried in the ground?
SPEAK
Read aloud Matthew 13:11 and16–17
Hearing and seeing Jesus regularly is a blessing that prophets like Moses longed to experience. Write down something you’ve heard from Jesus recently and share how it has blessed you.
What are the areas of your faith in which you don’t see or hear from Jesus clearly right now?
When Jesus is hard to hear or see that doesn’t mean you aren’t blessed, it may mean you are in a season of waiting. Read Psalm 62:1. Share ways you’ve been blessed when your “soul waits in silence.”
RISK
Meditate on Matthew 25:21
What stands out to you the most in this verse? What does this verse say the “good and faithful servant” will be rewarded with?
Based upon The Parable of the Talents (Matt. 25:14-30) do you think God has called you to be a heavy lifter, a medium lifter, or a light lifter for the kingdom based upon what you’ve been given? Does that excite or exhaust you?
The man who was given only one talent had an incorrect view of God, “Master, I knew you to be a hard man.....so I was afraid.” Where might you have an incorrect view of God? In light of that, what role has fear had in “burying your talent”?
CHAPTER 8
the common place
Scripture Reading
Acts 1:1-11
I have a large garden. It’s mostly wild and weed-ridden, but as time goes on, I attempt to tame a corner of it at a time. I recently learned what it means to turn soil over as a practice for healthy dirt. This is when you break up the hardened surface of the soil to expose weeds, enable water to deeply penetrate the soil, and to increase oxygenation.
This is what we’ve been doing in the study. Turning the soil over. Exposing weeds. Allowing ourselves to be deeply refreshed. To take in deep breaths that require breaking surface levels. My favorite part of the blessed storyline is that it began in the dirt. It grew from the very substance that Adam was formed out of (Gen. 2:7).
We’ve all come from the common ground of ordinary.
Our culture fights against being common, but God is obsessed with it. In Acts, the Greek word for common, koinos , is used five times. Its use in Acts draws a clear line between the Gentile and Israel. A Gentile is known by the very “quality of the ordinary” whereas Israel is known as “set-apart.”7
Post-cross people are not blessed because of their specialness, but because of their ordinariness. It’s beautiful that God calls us clean when we are anything but.
The nation of Israel was set apart for the special purpose of ushering in the Messiah. We are the ordinary and ritually unclean outsiders who get planted
GOD MADE DIRT
alongside them to usher in the kingdom of God. Why? Because God loved us. What a gift! God says, break up the soil. Make room for ordinary. Let them drink, breathe, and grow under my care too.
If you are plain, lack skill, aren’t that impressive, don’t know as much as some, and don’t have as much as others—God says, you. I want you. This is what makes following Jesus different than any other religion. There is no hierarchy, no pyramid scheme, no report card, no income bracket. There is just ordinary people being loved by an extraordinary God.
But as we’ve seen chapter by chapter, our culture clashes with this idea of being loved because we’re ordinary. Instead, we are constantly presented with an ideology that skirts the common, putting oneself above the dirt we’ve all come from.
Culture says: You deserve the good life. Scripture says: You have the good life.
Culture says: Blessing is a human right. Scripture says: Blessing is a gift from God.
Culture says: Blessing shouldn’t be limited. Scripture says: God’s limitations are love.
Culture Says: You’ll never have enough. Scripture says: You lack nothing.
Culture says: Blessed are the healthy, wealthy, and happy. Scripture says: Blessed are the faithful.
Culture says: Only pretty things are blessed things. Scripture says: All things are blessed things.
Culture says: To be blessed is to love yourself. Scripture says: To be blessed is to love others more than yourself.
And now?
Culture says: Blessed are those who follow their heart. Scripture says: Blessed are those who follow the Spirit.
FOCUS BOOK: ACTS
Context: Acts of the early church
Genre: New Testament Historical Narrative
Original audience: The early church who had been “commissioned by Jesus for a worldwide mission empowered by the Holy Spirit.”1
Author’s intent: Luke follows “...the ever-increasing scope of [the ‘newborn’ church] and their witness as they were directed and empowered by the Holy Spirit.”2
NEW STUFF
New Covenant: “Sovereign administration of grace instituted by God through Jesus Christ for the redemption of fallen humanity, replacing and fulfilling the old covenant, which was expressed primarily through the Mosaic law.”5
Purpose of Acts: To follow the narrative of the emerging Christian church from Jerusalem to the “ends of the earth” as was prophesied in fulfillment of Old Testament prediction.6
NEW TERMS
Holy Spirit - (Heb., qodesh ruwach) - n. — the spirit of the God of Israel that is associated with his power and also closely associated with his person.
Holy Spirit - (Greek, pneuma) - n. — the life force animating all of God’s most audacious moves.
Common - (Greek, koinos) - adj. — being ritually unclean, understood especially as having the quality of the ordinary as opposed to the setapart.3
Atonement - n. — “The means of reconciliation between God and people. Emerges in the Old Testament as part of the sacrificial system; reframed exclusively around the person and work of Jesus Christ in the New Testament.”4
PUT IT IN THE BANK
“And awe came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts...”
ACTS 2:43-46
What is the Spirit and why do we need it to be blessed? Well first, we need to understand where it comes from. After Jesus came, taught and changed the world, he was crucified. Scholars debate the specific age, but Jesus was in his early thirties when he was murdered. Why couldn’t he have had a long life of healing and loving people and dying in his sleep?
One word—atonement.
Atonement “expresses the notion of divine forgiveness as the removal...of human guilt and the turning away of God’s wrath.”8 Not a word often seen in the New Testament, but it is spoken of in length during the Last Supper (Matt. 26:2628), in Paul’s teaching in Romans (Rom. 5:6-8), and in one of the most beautiful explanations in Hebrews 9:12-14:
...[Jesus] entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.
Jesus came to turn the soil. To plant something new where only dead things were before. But for atonement to be possible, Jesus couldn’t die any old way he pleased. He had to die in the way his Father designed the unconditional covenants to function. Jesus didn’t chuck God’s plan and go rogue in how to redeem the world. Instead, he submitted himself to the old sacrificial system in order to make way for the new. “...he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8 nlt).
For atonement to be possible, Jesus had to be sinless and innocent. He had to be the best human who ever lived to cover the worst all humanity had ever done. Birthed inside the ugliest event in the history of the world is the majestic miracle that every single human is covered by the blood of Jesus.
But we’re not only covered, we’re also commissioned.
THE FIRST ACT
Commission is a fancy word for sent. After Jesus died, the people who still followed him were confused and scared. But Jesus said his absence wasn’t to
JESUS CAME TO TURN THE SOIL. TO PLANT SOMETHING NEW WHERE ONLY DEAD THINGS WERE BEFORE.
leave them empty, but to fill them: “Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you (John 16:7).
God never takes away something without replacing it with something new.9
When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance (Acts 2:1-4).
This is how the church was born.
In a regular old house on this great big earth, common people met together in an unexciting place and waited on the Lord. Soon, heaven broke in like a rushing wind. The invisible force gave way to flickering flames and lit anew every heart that had been cooled by Jesus’ leaving.
When the Spirit burst into a common space to baptize believers with an uncommon fire, the blessed life burned brighter than it ever had before. The Spirit illuminates the ordinary, making our very lives something altogether different. In Acts 2:6, we encounter the first blessing to come out of Pentecost: “the multitude came together.” These Spirit-filled folks didn’t lock the doors and keep the fire for themselves, they went into the city and began speaking to “people from all over the known world.”10
This isn’t unrelated to the story of Israel that we’ve been unpacking for chapters now. “Redemption is linked to...the descendents of Abraham...that they themselves will be the means of blessing flowing out to all the nations of the world.”11 God kept his covenant promise, Israel was the means, Jesus was the Messiah. God loved the nation of Israel so much that he chose them to initiate the great joy of hosting what would become the global church—one ordinary street at at time.
In Acts 2, the first act of Holy Spirit furthers this idea of an uncommon community because it wasn’t performing a miracle, launching into a sermon series, or bringing about judgement. Instead, the first act of the Holy Spirit was to praise God in a foreign language. “And they were amazed and astonished, saying, ‘Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us
in his own native language?’” (Acts 2:7-8).
What does it say about the Holy Spirit if his inaugurating act was to empower people to praise God in a language they were never taught or even understood?
You know when the Holy Spirit is walking around in your neighborhood when you are speaking in a language of love you don’t understand. When you begin seeing people with new eyes, loving people you used to avoid, and praising God with them and for them in a spirit of unity. The Holy Spirit is in action when differences don’t divide us, rather they align us.
God is all about united differences. The unity of the Old Covenant law and New Covenant love is a perfect example of this.
In the Old Testament, “the Holy Spirit comes temporarily on special people for special acts of power.”12 It came on Moses (Num. 11:17, 29) and Joshua (Num. 27:18) and many other prophets and judges to retain Israel’s identity as the nation from which the Messiah would be born. In the New Testament, the Holy Spirit came on One Man so that we could “have all things in common” through a Spirit who speaks a universal language.
The Spirit isn’t some newfangled invention that God delivers out of nowhere once Jesus leaves earth. This is the same Holy Spirit in the Old Testament—the only difference now is its equal distribution to all, limitlessly. “For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure” (John 3:34).
The blessed storyline has found its apex: the immeasurable gift of the Holy Spirit.
This is what God has been leading up to for generations upon generations. This is the blessing to top all other blessings. It is the gift of God’s indwelling presence that takes residence in the heart of any person who believes that Jesus is God and acts accordingly.
SYNTHETIC POWER
But here’s the problem. Some of us aren’t that impressed by the Holy Spirit. In a post-Christian culture we have so many ways to consume God we aren’t that interested in his consuming fire. We’ve got the Bible. We’ve got podcasts. We’ve got numerous translations. We’ve got Jesus. We’ve got worship music to fit our every mood. Why do we need this ghost guy?
Several years ago, I remember the shame I felt in admitting that I didn’t experience the presence of the Holy Spirit at work in my life. I didn’t see his power. I didn’t
exist, I started looking for him. The Bible was a good place to start.
And what I discovered is the Holy Spirit is the life force animating all of God’s most audacious moves. He hovered over the waters before time began. He filled up the prophets and gave them words to say, dreams to interpret, songs to sing, and miracles to make. He filled up warriors, kings, and visionaries like Joseph, David, Gideon, Joshua and Isaiah. He split seas, animated pillars of fire, knocked down walls with sound waves, and painted prophetic pictures in the sky of one’s psyche.
The Holy Spirit is what takes you off road into the blessed life you would never blaze for yourself. He is a risk taker. The big dreamer. The wild hair. The holy help. And he is also the wise whisper when the world is screaming lies. He is the one who asks you to sit still when everyone says to run at full speed.
The Holy Spirit is the animating force of your future. With him as your guide you get to be with God without measure. Without him? You get to make the same old moves in the same old way with the same old comfort and the same old sin.
There is absolutely no way to reverse the curse of comfort in our lives without the Holy Spirit.
A.W. Tozer writes, “[We] have imitated the world, sought popular favor, manufactured delights to substitute for the joy of the Lord and produced a cheap and synthetic power to substitute for the power of the Holy Ghost.” Without the Spirit, manufactured delights and synthetic power seep into our souls and we become sick from the additives of a self-led life.
When Christ followers tap into the overflowing power God packed in our puny little hearts (through ordinary obedience that activates holy risk), we experience the greatness of a life well directed. We might still appear common, but we will stand out as different.
Francis Chan writes about this in his book on the Holy Spirit, Forgotten God:
“I don’t want my life to be explainable without the Holy Spirit. I want people to look at my life and know I couldn’t be doing this in my own power. I want to live in such a way that I am desperate for him to come through. That if he doesn’t come through, I am screwed. (I probably shouldn’t write that word here, but it’s how I truly feel about this.)”
Are you desperate for the blessed life that becomes the unexplainable life? If so, culture will want you to explain why your life looks the way it does. They certainly wanted an explanation from the early church in Acts.
THE BLESSED STORYLINE HAS FOUND ITS APEX: THE IMMEASURABLE GIFT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.
LIVING THE DREAM
In the historical context of the book of Acts, the early church would have been a living example of a widely known and sought after Greek lifestyle: “And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:44-45).
At that time in history, “Plato envisioned his ideal republic as one devoid of all private ownership.”13 So this idea of a common place where people were of one mind and no one was in need aligned with Greek culture’s vision of utopia.
Imagine Greek culture’s surprise when a small group of unimportant commoners led by an invisible Spirit was actually able to create a life they’d always wanted. This collection of early Jesus adopters were living the “Greek Dream.” One commentator said they would have been envied as a group of people actualizing the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s vision for humanity, “one soul dwelling in two bodies.”14
Culture wanted the counterfeit. The Spirit created the real deal.
Not much has changed. The Holy Spirit still has the power to build a community of people who have all things in common and willingly give up their comforts out of love to serve one another. In a polarized, post-Christian culture, the dream of unity and brotherly love isn’t a lost cause—it’s the result of walking faithfully in the Spirit. When ordinary people gather in a common place doing the uncommon work of the Spirit, the blessed life moves beyond what the world can manufacture—it becomes real.
So here’s the bottom line about being blessed: a life lived in submission to a good God through Jesus empowered by the Spirit is what frees us from the curse of comfort.
Only through God’s grace can we be released from the cultural law of not having enough as well as from the attachments we have to “too much.” This is a gift given to every single person who believes Jesus is God—not just special people at critical moments in history, but all the time.
In closing, I think it’s important to note that I haven’t been to the dollar store since I saw that blessed mug. But in reality, I’m sure I’ll go there again. Yes, I know I’d be better off lighting my wallet on fire, but, alas, this is the state of the human heart. Even though we know better, doesn’t mean we change for the better. That’s where the Spirit comes in.
Without him, it’s much easier to go back to the cheaper ways of following Christ
than to actually live in complete allegiance to our King over our comforts.
As a flawed human who is trying her best to figure out how to live the blessed life God intended—I’m still tempted to settle for a version of off-brand blessing that I can make or buy with my own two hands. There are times I long to impress others instead of blessing them. I still struggle to believe that I won’t be disappointed when I give up the comforts I crave. I find myself asking the hard questions, like is God’s blessing worth it, can I really trust him, does he truly have my best interests at heart?
But just this week as I was cleaning out my car (if you have young kids, this is a never ending reality), something became clear to me. If the curse of comfort is an expectation of ease under the illusion of control—then the blessing of Jesus is an expectation of joy under the reality of surrender.
When I find myself on my knees cleaning up someone else’s mess, I can choose joy or I can choose anger. When I find myself financially far from where I think I need to be, I can choose joy or I can choose envy. When I find myself getting smaller and smaller instead of greater and greater, I can choose joy or I can choose despair. When I am faced with pain, betrayal, boredom or loss, I can choose control or I can choose surrender.
The blessed life isn’t something to hold onto tightly, it is something to let go of willingly.
The reality of surrender to the Spirit is that it isn’t cheap. There isn’t a half-yearly sale or a bargain bin to rifle through. There isn’t a size of surrender that fits perfectly either. It will feel too big at first and cost you at least what it cost Jesus: everything.
How do you get to everything? You start small with something. You start with asking the Spirit what must I lay down next? You start looking for ways to be emptied out of ego and filled up with empathy. You start with one word on behalf of someone who can’t speak up for themselves. You start by admitting that control isn’t yours to claim. You start with the corner of your life where you are most comfortable and ask the Spirit to help you to dismantle it one idol at a time.
The blessed person is one who invites the Spirit to continually plant new starts in freshly turned soil. It is to ask God to continually expose, refresh, renew and regenerate the dirt that so easily encases us in complacency. God does the work of awakening us to new life, new trust, and new vision. He’s on his knees cleaning up our mess, day after day. Our job is to confess that we need him to.
And all the people who know what it means to be truly blessed say, “Amen.”
Culture says: Blessed are those who follow their heart. Scripture says: Blessed are those who follow the Spirit.
READ
Acts 2:42-47
What activities did the early church take part in? (Take note of all the actions/verbs in this section.) How often were people being added to church attendance? (v. 46)
If all the things that these believers were doing were activated by the Holy Spirit, what do you think is the most noteworthy difference this church experienced that you haven’t or would like to?
We often categorize relationships based upon what we have in common with others. What does verse 44 give as the reason this church had “all things in common?”
SPEAK
Read aloud Acts 4:13
Why were the rulers and scribes amazed at the boldness of Peter and John? What did they “recognize” about Peter and John?
Why do you think God loves to pour out his Spirit on common people in common places for common purposes?
The Holy Spirit is given to heal, strengthen, guide, and encourage others. What role have you seen the Holy Spirit play in your own life and in the community around you?
RISK
Meditate on Acts 4:42
Ask the Holy Spirit to test and prove what biblical blessing is. In your own words write a definition of what it means to be blessed by God. Share your definition with one another and conclude your time praying for God’s blessing to overflow in each other’s lives.
3. Mark Sayers, Disappearing Church: From Cultural Relevance to Gospel Resilience (Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2016), 16.
4. Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel, (Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah Books, 1990), 11.
CHAPTER 1
1. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “blessed,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed February 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.bless.v.01
2. Todd Miles, “Introduction to Genre” (video presentation, Biblical Theology 501, Western Seminary, February, 2019).
5. Derek Kidner, Genesis: An Introduction and Commentary, Volume 1, ed. D. J. Wiseman (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1967), 56–57.
6. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “create,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed February, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.create.v.02
8. Kenneth A. Mathews, The New American Commentary: Genesis 1–11:26, Volume 1A (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996), 164.
9. Christine Huda Dodge. “Creation of the Universe and Evolution in Islam.” https://www.learnreligions.com/creation-of-theuniverse-2004201 (accessed February, 2019).
10. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “blessed,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed February, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.bless.v.011
11. Robert L. Thomas, New American Standard Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Dictionaries (Foundation Publications, Inc., 1998), accessed February, 2019, https://ref.ly/logosres/nasbdict?ref=HebrewStrongs.1254-H1254a
12. Kenneth A. Mathews, The New American Commentary: Genesis 1–11:26, Volume 1A (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996), 207.
13. Rolheiser, Ronald. The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. New York: Doubleday, 1999.
14. https://www.bemadiscipleship.com/433
CHAPTER 2
1. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “cursed,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed February 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.be+cursed.v.03
2. Todd Miles, “Introduction to Genre” (video presentation, Biblical Theology 501, Western Seminary, February, 2019); Michael Lawrence, Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church: A Guide for Ministry (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 45.
3. Ibid.
4. Allen P. Ross, The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, Volume 1, ed. J. F Walvoord & R. B. Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985), 33.
5. K. A. Matthew, The New American Commentary, An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture, Genesis 1-11:26, Volume 1A (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1996), 307.
6. Allen P. Ross, The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, Volume 1, ed. J. F Walvoord & R. B. Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985),33–34.
CHAPTER 3
1. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “covenant,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed February, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.covenant.n.03
2. Andreas J. Kostenberger & Richard Patterson, For the Love of God’s Word: An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: MI, Kregel Publications), 70.
3. Thomas R. Schreiner, Covenant and God’s Purpose for the World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 13.
4. Andreas J. Kostenberger & Richard Patterson, For the Love of God’s Word:An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: MI, Kregel Publications), 129
5. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “covenant,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed February, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.covenant.n.03
6. Andreas J. Kostenberger & Richard Patterson, For the Love of God’s Word: An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: MI, Kregel Publications), 75.
7. Ibid., 74.
8. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “humankind,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed March, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.humankind.n.01
9. Jack S. Deere, The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, Volume 1, ed. J. F Walvoord & R. B. Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985), 311.
10. Andreas J. Kostenberger & Richard Patterson, For the Love of God’s Word: An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: MI, Kregel Publications), 71.
11. BEMA Discipleship. “A Kingdom of What?” Episode 25 of The BEMA Podcast, hosted by Marty Solomon and Brent Billings. Original audio published March 30, 2017. Episode updated June 23, 2025. Accessed [your access date]. https:// www.bemadiscipleship.com/25.
13. Andreas J. Kostenberger & Richard Patterson, For the Love of God’s Word: An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: MI, Kregel Publications), 63.
14. Thomas R. Schreiner, Covenant and God’s Purpose for the World (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017), 99.
CHAPTER 4
1. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “repent,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation, Lexham Press, 2015, accessed March, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.repent.v.02
2. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “wealth,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation, Lexham Press, 2015, accessed March, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.wealth.n.03
3. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “blessed,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed February, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.bless.v.01
4. Todd Miles, “Hermeneutics” (video presentation Lesson 9, Video 3, Biblical Theology 501, Western Seminary, February, 2019).
5. Ibid.
6. Andreas J. Kostenberger & Richard Patterson, For the Love of God’s Word: An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: MI, Kregel Publications), 148.
7. Crossway Bibles. Introduction to Job in ESV: Study Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2012)
8. Craig L. Blomberg, Neither Poverty Nor Riches: A biblical theology of possessions, ed. D. A. Carson (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 58.
9. Andreas J. Kostenberger & Richard Patterson, For the Love of God’s Word: An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: MI, Kregel Publications), 115.
10. R. L. Alden, Job, Volume 11 (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1993), 409.
11. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “blessed,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed February, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.bless.v.01
12. Robert L. Thomas, New American Standard Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Dictionaries (Foundation Publications, Inc., 1998) accessed March, 2019, https://ref.ly/logosres/nasbdict?ref=HebrewStrongs.835
13. Anxiety & Depression Association of America, “Facts & Statistics,” accessed June 30, 2019, https://adaa.org/about-adaa/ press-room/facts-statistics
14. Matthew Easton, “Chemosh,” Easton’s Bible Dictionary, (Harper & Brothers, 1893), accessed March 2019, http://eastonsbibledictionary.org/785-Chemosh.php.
15. Thomas L. Constable, The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, Volume 1, ed. J. F Walvoord & R. B. Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985), 501.
16. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “thrive,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation, Lexham Press, 2015, accessed May, 2019, https://ref.ly/logosres/nac22?ref=Bible.Mt5.13-14&off=133
IN-BETWEEN BLESSINGS
1. Derek Kidner, Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries, Psalm 1–72, Volume 15 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1973), 254.
2. James McPolin (1989),81–83 quoted in Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty Nor Riches:A Biblical Theology of Material Possessions, ed. D. A. Carson, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 61.
3. Norman K. Gottwald (1985), 573 quoted in Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty Nor Riches:A Biblical Theology of Material Possessions, ed. D. A. Carson, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 65.
4. Ibid, 64.
5. C. Brand et al., Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers), 441.
CHAPTER 5
1. Andreas J. Kostenberger & Richard Patterson, For the Love of God’s Word: An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: MI, Kregel Publications), 197.
2. Ibid.
3. D. Mangum, D. R. Brown, R. Klippenstein, and R. Hurst, eds., “exile,” Lexham Theological Wordbook, D. Mangum et al (Lexham Press, 2014), accessed March, 2019, https://ref.ly/logosres/lxtheowrdbk?hw=Exile
4. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “blessed,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed February, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.bless.v.01
6. Michael Lawrence, Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church: A Guide for Ministry (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 45.
7. Ibid.
8. P.R. Ackroyd and M.A. Powell, The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary, Third Edition (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), 268.
9. R.T. France, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries, Matthew, Volume 1 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 91. 10. Ibid,91–92
11. L.A. Barbieri, Jr., The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, Volume 2, ed. Matthew. J. F. Walvoord and R. B. Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985), 23.
12. Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty Nor Riches:A Biblical Theology of Material Possessions, ed. D. A. Carson, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 106.
13. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “blessed,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed February, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.bless.v.01
14. T. Desmond Alexander et al., New Dictionary of Biblical Theology (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 67.
15. Craig, Blomberg, The New American Commentary, Matthew: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture, volume 22, (Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1992), 102.
CHAPTER 6
1. Andreas J. Kostenberger & Richard Patterson, For the Love of God’s Word: An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: MI, Kregel Publications), 197.
2. Ibid.
3. J. J. Scott, Jr., Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible, Volume 2, ed. Walter Elwell (Baker Book House, 1988), accessed April, 2019, https://ref.ly/logosres/bkrencbib?hw=Synoptic+Gospels
4. G.G. Porton, The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary Volume 5, ed. D. N. Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 892.
5. A. J. Saldarini, The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary, Volume 5, ed. D.N. Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 296.
9. Paul D. Wegner, The Journey from Texts to Translations: The Origin and Development of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 1999) 63.
10. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “turn aside,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed April, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.turn+aside.v.01
11. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “utterly astound,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed April, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.astound+utterly.v.01
12. J. D. Grassmick, The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, Mark, Volume 2, ed. J. F. Walvoord & R. B. Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985),163–164.
13. Craig Blomberg, Neither Poverty Nor Riches:A Biblical Theology of Material Possessions, ed. D. A. Carson, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 58.
14. J.A. Martin, The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, Volume 2, ed. J. F. Walvoord and R. B. Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985), 234.
15. R.T. France, The New International Greek Testament Commentary, The Gospel of Mark, ed. Howard Marshall and Donald A. Hagner (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans), 400.
CHAPTER 7
1. Andreas J. Kostenberger & Richard Patterson, For the Love of God’s Word: An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: MI, Kregel Publications), 197.
2. Ibid.
3. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “parable,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed April, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.parable.n.01
6. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “kingdom of God,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed April, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.kingdom+of+god.n.01
7. L.A. Barbieri, Jr., The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, Volume 2, ed. J. F. Walvoord and R. B. Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985),48–49.
8. Ibid.
9. R. T. France, Tyndale New Testament Commentary, Matthew, Volume 1 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1985), 227.
10. Wikipedia, “Parables of Jesus,” accessed May, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parables_of_Jesus
11. L.A. Barbieri, Jr., The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, Volume 2, ed. Matthew. J. F. Walvoord and R. B. Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985), 80.
12. Michael Lawrence, Biblical Theology in the Life of the Church: A Guide for Ministry (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2010), 111.
13. J.A. Martin, The Bible Knowledge Commentary: An Exposition of the Scriptures, Volume 2, ed. J. F. Walvoord and R. B. Zuck (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1985), 246.
14. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “kingdom of God,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed April, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.kingdom+of+god.n.01
CHAPTER 8
1. John B. Polhill, The New American Commentary, Acts: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture, Volume 26 (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1992), 77.
2. Ibid.
3. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “declare unclean,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed May, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.declare+unclean.v.01
4. R. Brown et al, “atonement,” Lexham Bible Dictionary (Lexham Press, 2014), accessed May, 2019, https://ref.ly/logosres/ lbd?hw=Atonement
5. W.A. Elwell & J.B. Beitzel, Baker encyclopedia of the Bible, Volume 1, ed. Walter Elwell (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1988), 536.
6. Andreas J. Kostenberger & Richard Patterson, For the Love of God’s Word: An Introduction to Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: MI, Kregel Publications), 204.
7. Sean Boison, Mark Keaton, Jeremy Thompson, and David Witthof, eds., “declare unclean,” Bible Sense Lexicon: Dataset Documentation (Lexham Press, 2015), accessed May, 2019, https://ref.ly/logos4/Senses?KeyId=ws.declare+unclean.v.01
8. A. M. Rodrigues, “atonement,” Lexham Theological Wordbook, D. Mangum et al, (Lexham Press, 2014), accessed May, 2019, https://ref.ly/logosres/lxtheowrdbk?hw=Atonement
9. Brian McCormack (Lead Pastor, Reach Church, Washington), in conversation with Megan Johnson, October, 2018.
10. I. Howard Marshall, Tyndale New Testament Commentary, Acts, Volume 5 (Grand Rapids, MI: InterVarsity Press, 1980), 76.
11. T. Desmond Alexander et al., New Dictionary of Biblical Theology (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 2000), 619.
12. Ibid., 71.
13. John B. Polhill, The New American Commentary, Acts: An Exegetical and Theological Exposition of Holy Scripture, volume 26 (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1992), 151.
