John 10:11 Who is the Good Shepherd?

Most Christians are familiar with the 23^rd Psalm.  Many can quote it by heart.

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.

‘Want’, of course, here is old English and means ‘to lack or be without’. 

Some might paraphrase this as, Because the Lord is my Shepherd, I have everything I need.

Astute Bible students notice that the word Lord here is capitalized.  Lord

That means that it refers to the personal name of God, sometimes given as Jehovah or Yahweh.  Its pronunciation has always been a bit of mystery.  Maybe because Jewish people were afraid of taking it in vain, as in the Ten Commandments, they made a point of never saying it.  I don’t know.

So why is all this important?

Because in the New Testament, Jesus says a few things about being a shepherd Himself.

John 10:11.  “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.

In the context, Jesus is talking about the religious leaders of His time, and He is contrasting how He takes care of the sheep, meaning, God’s people, compared to the religious leaders.

Yet, in other places in the book of John, Jesus makes a lot of amazing, absolute claims that would suggest that He had more in mind here.

In John 6:35, He is the Bread of Life.  In John 8:12, He is the Light of the world.  In John 11:25, He is the Resurrection and the Life.  In John 14:6, He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  In John 15:1,5, He is the Vine, the true Vine.  And here He is the Good Shepherd.

In each case, the word I is emphasized.  I, me, I am the Good Shepherd.  In Greek, the pronoun I is one word with the verb.  When you add it separately, you are emphasizing it.  It would be like saying, if you want a good shepherd, you have to come to Me.  The word Good is also emphasized.  It reads literally, I, me, I am the Shepherd, the good One.

So, yes, on the one hand, He is talking about the religious leaders there, but when you look at all the other I AM statements, it strongly suggests that Jesus intended to us to think of the 23^rd Psalm here as well.  If Jesus is the Shepherd, the good One, then what does that say about the Lord in Psalm 23?  Or, more, what does this say about Jesus?

We tend to think of Jesus only as the One who died for our sins and rose again.  But if He is Bread, Light, the Way, the Truth, the Life, the Resurrection, the Vine, and the Shepherd, the good one, then we need to think again and more about all that Jesus is.  Dying and rising again are past events.  We need to think more of how we relate to Him now.

Matthew 28-18-20 Another Look at the Great Commission

Matthew 28:18–20 (NASB95)  18 And Jesus came up and spoke to them, saying, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19 “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

After I decided to write this, I realized that some of the points I wanted to talk about are more suited to a seminary classroom than these kinds of articles.  That’s all to say that there is a lot more here than most people will realize.  But there’s still a lot left.

The Great Commission appears in a slightly different form in Mark.  Some people might wonder why.  My explanation is that when Jesus gave these great commissions, they were part of a longer conversation, and He probably said both of them as a part of it.

The wise approach here would be to study the two passages together and use the one to explain the other. 

For example, each commission has one main command.  In Mark it’s to preach the gospel, and Matthew says to make disciples.  Mark is looking for people to believe, Matthew for people who keep His commandments. 

But if you look earlier in Mark’s gospel, when Jesus first began preaching to the people, He said: Repent and believe in the gospel.”  Mark 1:15

So believing in the gospel is not just a mental assent, a short prayer; it’s a life commitment to follow Jesus.  You can’t believe in the gospel without it changing your life.  The good news of the gospel isn’t merely that we can now go to heaven, but that now God comes to reside in us so that we can now live a new life, empowered by the Holy Spirit.

In Matthew, the command is to make disciples.  And how do we do that?  We baptize them and teach them. 

Notice that baptism is at the beginning of this new life. 

Bible scholars differ over the meaning of baptism, how to do it, and who all should get it.  I understand that.  But there should be no confusion over the fact that baptism is to be at the beginning of this new life and not years down the road.  Maybe we scare too many people out of getting baptized, because we make such a public spectacle out of it with the person having to talk before the entire church.  Perhaps I should say that the idea of moving baptism down the road started early in church history, because a lot of people who had gotten baptized didn’t stick with it, but then I don’t think this is our call to make.

Then we are to teach them.  Teach them what?  It seems that Jesus wants a particular emphasis on the things that He taught them. 

We often suggest to new believers, or anyone, to read the Book of Proverbs every month, one chapter a day, or the Book of Psalms once a month, 5 psalms a day.  I just decided to read at least a chapter of the gospels every day.  I want to focus more on things that Jesus actually said and did.  I include the book of Acts with this, because Luke and Acts are two volumes of one book.

Jesus didn’t say, teach this new disciple the Bible.  He said, teach them what I have taught you, the disciples.

You would think churches would have ongoing classes on the gospels every week, seeing how important this is.

And notice that the new believer is called a disciple.  We had discussions in Bible school about whether a person could be a Christian and not be a disciple.  Yet in the book of Acts, the word ‘disciple’ is probably how Christians are referred to more than any other name.  When you realize that the Book of Acts is actually volume two of the Book of Luke, you need to do a Bible study of Luke to see how he uses the word ‘disciple.’   You will probably be surprised.

Bible teachers will often tell you that the apostles, the twelve disciples, lived under different rules than we do.  God wanted them to do miracles and have the power of the Holy Spirit more than believers after their time did.

Except that Jesus’ command in the Great Commission for new believers is to teach them to do everything that God had commanded the disciples.  So I find it hard to believe that God expected Christians down through the centuries to live their lives any differently than these twelve did.

Maybe our biggest problem is that both Great Commissions begin with the word ‘Go’, and we don’t know how to go when we are living among the very people we are to go to.  We don’t know how to engage our neighbors with the gospel.  The apostles seemed to be able to go to new places and immediately begin preaching, and we don’t know how we can do that. 

I’ll have to think about that.

John 1:14 UFOs and Space Aliens

Not everyone is going to see the point or value in talking about UFOs and aliens from other planets, but I hope you stick around.  UFOs have been in the news lately because of a report that came out of Israel.  But so far, it is just that, a report.

In John 1:14, it says that “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

God became man, so He could redeem man from sin, and man could now live with God.

Jesus died, was buried, and rose again, and now sits in the presence of God on our behalf.  Jesus is still Jesus in heaven, existing in a glorified body.  A glorified human body.

So what does this have to do with UFOs and space aliens?

Jesus became flesh to save human beings.  That’s it.  If there is anyone else out there on other planets, Jesus did not save them. 

We are told that aliens from outer space are intelligent beings, far more advanced than we are.  Yet we are the ones that Jesus came to save.  We are created in God’s image. 

In Revelation 7, a picture is shown of a great gathering in heaven, that no one is able to count, people from every nation, tribe, people, and tongue.  But all from this planet.

In Genesis 1, God created the stars.  Why?  “Let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth.”  Genesis 1:14,15

It is from the movement of the sun and the stars that we have any way to telling time or counting years.  They are also used for navigation on the seas or for travel across land.  We are not as dependent on this as we used to.  But who doesn’t know how to find true north when he needs to?

This may seem like a lot of work for God just to provide directions or to tell time.  God could, I suppose, just have put signs all around or given everyone wrist watches.

Our ever-increasing knowledge of the universe should increase similarly our ever-increasing awe of God, and for those of us who serve this God an ever-increasing appreciation of what it means to be human and the object of God’s redemption through the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Human beings are the center of God’s creation. 

Those people who do not want to acknowledge God in their lives look at these same things and see human’s insignificance.  In a universe so vast, we are but specks of dust, grains of sand in a vast desert.  With billions of stars, surely they say, there must be millions of planets, and surely there must be life throughout all of space.

Other scientists see our planet so unique, if life depended on environment, it’s a wonder life exists at all.

As I said, UFOs have been in the news lately because of a report that came out of Israel. 

There was supposed to have been a sighting over Dallas recently.  You see lights in the night sky, but as the moniker says: they are UNIDENTIFIED flying objects.

In the book of Ezekiel, Ezekiel saw angelic beings, and he talks about wheels.  “As for their rims they were lofty and awesome, and the rims of all four of them were full of eyes round about.”  Ezekiel 1:18  Remember the drawings of UFOs as round saucers with windows all around?  Maybe they were actually eyes.

I suppose some people will say that Ezekiel saw UFOs, and others might say that the people who saw UFOs saw angelic beings.

For those people who believe the Bible is God’s word to humankind, they may see the answer as settled.  Those who think there is more to be seen here must insist that more is seen here before rendering judgment.

 

James 5:13-18 Another Look at Prayer and Healing

Healing in the Bible is a big subject.  I wrote a book on it; it took 356 pages and 64 chapters.  It’s also controversial.  That doesn’t mean that you avoid the subject.  It means that you need to work harder on it, so you are sure that you have the right answer.  Who knows?  Maybe someday it will save your life.  I think it saved mine.  Probably at least three times. 

I discussed this passage in my book, but reading this passage in James again, it looks like I could write another chapter.  It’s an important passage and worth a closer look.

James 5:13–18 (The translation is mine.  There are some places where translations can be different.  If you have a question about one, let me know and I will explain why I did what I did.)

13 Is anyone suffering among you?  Let him pray.

The word suffering here is a general word.  It can cover anything from a really bad day to a major illness.

Is anyone cheerful?  Let him sing praises.

The words ‘sing praises’ is the verb form of the noun for psalms, which was the Hebrew hymnbook.  Some might argue that it may simply mean ‘sing’ or even play an instrument, though not everyone can do that.  But it would seem strange that James would encourage people to just sing anything. 

14 Is anyone sick among you?

The word literally means to be weak and means that in probably most times it occurs in the Bible, including the Greek Old Testament.  Like Samson becoming weak like other men.

But it is also the word used most commonly for being sick. 

He’s going to tell you in a second to call for the elders of the church if this applies to you, and the Lord will raise you up.  So this is a lot more than just being or feeling weak.  You wouldn’t call for the elders of the church if you just felt weak.

Some Bible scholars argue that this is not a physical sickness but an emotional one.  They seem to want to avoid the miracle of physical healing, but from what I’ve seen of people with emotional problems, they are harder to fix than physical ones, so that would be a greater miracle if they were restored. 

Then let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord;

I know elders do this when they are asked.  I just don’t think they are asked very often.  Maybe most people haven’t been taught to do this, or they don’t expect it to make any difference.   I don’t know.  It’s a question worth asking.

15 and the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up,

The expression is literally ‘the prayer of faith,’ not the prayer offered in faith, and people may argue what that means, but James already explained it in chapter one.

James 1:6–8   6 But let him ask in faith doubting nothing,

James had mentioned just prior to this about asking God for wisdom.  He said God is very willing to give it, but you can’t doubt that He will, otherwise . . . .

for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind. 7 For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord, 8 being a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.

otherwise, he shouldn’t suppose that he will get anything from God. 

Christians seem afraid that they are presuming on God when they expect to get the thing they prayed for.  Well, God expects you to believe that you will get wisdom if you ask for it.  And it seems the same for healing.  I know some people will say that they tried it, and it didn’t work, or they know somebody else who tried it and it didn’t work.  I’ll talk about that a little later.

and if he has committed sins, they will be forgiven him.

There seems to be a connection of some sort with people having done things they shouldn’t have or not doing things they should have and not dealing with that.  It seems that unresolved sins can play a role in a person’s sickness and recovery, though not necessarily.

16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another that you may be healed.

This passage can probably be understood in two ways: confessing your sins to one another and praying for each other can have a healing effect on you, or that healing is what they pray for.  I would say that James is saying that they should pray for healing, because the very next verse tells us how powerful prayer can be.

Again, some will argue that the healing here is emotional, not physical, but, again, I think that would be a far greater miracle than a physical one.  But he wants Christians to be open to other believers about their shortcomings and failures, and they should pray for each other for their healing, whatever kind it is.  James wouldn’t have told them to pray for it, if he didn’t expect it to happen.

And then James tells us how powerful prayer can be.

16 The effective prayer of a righteous man is very powerful.  17 Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the earth for three years and six months. 18 And he prayed again, and the sky poured rain and the earth produced its fruit.

Elijah’s ‘prayer’ is found in I Kings 17:1.   Now Elijah the Tishbite . . . said to Ahab, “As the LORD God of Israel lives before whom I stand, surely there shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.”

Elijah didn’t ask God to stop the rain.  He just declared it.  I know, people will say that he prayed before this, and he was just telling King Ahab what God told him.  I really think that if that is how it happened, then it would have said so. 

But even so.  The point is that Elijah was a man just like us, and if he could pray that it wouldn’t rain for 3 ½ years, we could and should pray for another believer to be healed. 

I see no other conclusion.

A few remarks before we finish:

1)      Things often don’t happen as fast as we would like or expect.  I had cancer twice.  The first time I never got treated, so I can’t tell you how fast anything changed.  The second time I got to stage 4 before it went to 0.  The doctor was a little concerned, but I never thought that I was going to die from this.

2)      John Wimber, a famous pastor with a noted healing ministry, wrote that he taught on healing for 6 months in his church, and nothing happened.  Then it started and never stopped. 

3)      Many of us have known people who have died or who have had chronic conditions that we thought should have been healed.  And we don’t know why.  All I can say is that there are a lot of things that we don’t know and never will.  And you will never know another person well enough to know why something happened in their life or not.  Our responsibility is to study the Bible, pray as much as possible, and live your life open before God and doing the things you believe the Bible tells you.

 

 

 

A Hermeneutical Problem

I know that by putting a fancy word in the title some people may not bother to read this, thinking that there is nothing there for them.

I decided to leave it in there, because life is like that.  Growth requires that we stretch ourselves and learn new things.  And those who don’t want to grow will miss out on things, though they often won’t know that they did, because they didn’t see what they might be missing.

I used the fancy word, because you will encounter Bible teachers who will use fancy words in their teaching, and the fancy words might intimidate you into thinking that they knew what they were talking about.

I say this kindly, but this is a very important hermeneutical problem, and you will hear different things, and you need to answer it for yourself. 

The term ‘hermeneutics’ has to do with how to interpret something, in this case, how to interpret the Bible. 

In this case, they will use another fancy word here, genre (john-er, with a softer j-sound).  Basically, what they’re saying is that different types of writing require different ways of interpreting them.  If a poem says that “the cow jumped over the moon,” we should recognize that this is poetry and is not meant to be taken literally.  So, no, a cow did not in fact jump over the moon.

So too in the Bible, we have songs, proverbs, poetry, and apocalyptic literature, and we should not take them literally.

You can make the case that the moon shall not be turned to blood, literally, but then there is the expression: ‘one of you shall chase a thousand, and two of you ten thousand.’  This expression is found three times in the Bible in various forms: Leviticus 26:7,8; Deuteronomy 32:30, Joshua 23:10.

Obviously, we can’t take that literally.  Right?  “One of you shall chase a thousand?”  Really?

Except that it did happen, literally, at least twice in the Bible.

In I Samuel 14, Jonathan went off to face the entire Philistine army by himself, and God gave him the victory.  And Gideon faced an army of over 100,000 soldiers with a force of 300.  Gideon had more soldiers at the beginning, but God told him to send most of them home.  God didn’t want any natural explanations for the outcome of the battle.

People are so smart today that they believe there are natural explanations for everything. 

And you, when you read the Bible, will encounter verses that may sound too good to be true.  And you have to decide if the Bible means what it says or just exaggerated for effect. 

Remember.  For a miracle to be a miracle, the situation has to be hopeless, with no way out.  And God will ask you: Is anything too hard for God?  (Jeremiah 32:27)

The challenge of life and the Christian life is to keep our focus on a God who is invisible and who speaks in a still soft voice, while we are bombarded constantly with noise, music, video, and talking heads. 

So we read the Bible to hear God’s word to us, and it may be in the form of what we call poetry.  And it may say something that sounds too good to be true.  And you have to decide if that’s what God meant or not.  I’m just saying: don’t assume that it is not, just because it’s poetry.  You might just miss out on your very own miracle.

 

Luke 15:20 His father ran and embraced him

In Luke 15, Jesus was criticized because He was welcoming some people whom the religious leaders despised.  They were tax collectors and sinners.  This is not to say that tax collectors weren’t considered to be sinners.  They were just noted, because they had a special place of disgust among the Jewish people, even non-religious ones.

And that wasn’t the first time.  Earlier in Luke (Luke 5:29-32), Jesus was in a similar situation, eating with tax collectors and sinners.  A little later they called him a friend of tax-collectors and sinners. (Luke 7:34)

Who were the sinners? 

I would say that they were those who were known not to be not particularly religious.  At least outwardly.  In Luke 7, a woman was described as a sinner, whom I’m guessing was probably a prostitute.  She came into a dinner where Jesus was and proceeded to anoint His feet with perfume.  In those days, they reclined on couches to eat rather than sitting at a table, so their feet were sticking out around the table.

In Luke 5:8, Peter had an encounter with Jesus and told Him: “Go away from me Lord, for I am a sinful man!”  The Greek word ‘sinner’ here is actually an adjective used as a noun, so when you read it in Greek, you see the connection here with the other uses of ‘sinner’ in Luke in a way you don’t see in English. 

But no need to worry, Peter, because just a little later, Jesus said: Luke 5:32 “I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance.”

But Luke 15 is the passage that concerns us here.

In the response to the criticism that Jesus received because He welcomed sinners and ate with them, He told three parables to make a point.  One point. 

In the first parable, He tells of a shepherd who has a hundred sheep and one gets lost.  He will leave the rest and go look for that one.

In the second, a woman lost a large coin.  People didn’t have checking accounts or credit cards in those days, and no government inflation from massive government borrowing and spending.  So they kept their money under their mattress.  She looks for it until she finds it and tells all her neighbors about it.

But in the third parable, the thing that was lost was a person, a man’s son.  And when the son finally returns home, it turns out the father had been constantly looking and waiting for him.  He couldn’t go to His son and make him come home.  After all, he was the one who left the father.

And when the father saw his son coming in the distance, he ran to meet him, fell on his neck and kissed him.  Then he called for a huge feast and celebration. 

YOU are that son, and God is the father who longs to hold you and kiss you.  Now it’s true, that in most relationships, it often takes a bit of a crisis to bring out the full extent of our feelings.  The father had another son who didn’t feel the love, though all that the father had belonged to him as well.

Feelings are elusive things.  We may not always feel that God loves us in that way or even that much.  I often tell people that that’s one reason why God built the experience of having children into our lives.  When we are the father, or mother, we know the love we have for our children, and hopefully we can understand a bit then of how much God loves us.

 

 

 

Psalm 108:12 Oh give us help against the adversary, for deliverance by man is in vain.

When you read a quote from the Bible, it often helps to know who wrote it or said it. 

In this case, it was David.  We know David as the shepherd boy who killed Goliath and later as the King over Israel.

What is less known about David was that for a time he was the commander of the army under King Saul, and he personally fought in many of the nation’s battles even after becoming king.

Why is that relevant?

On the one hand, a mighty and valiant warrior can easily think that he has succeeded, because he is a mighty and valiant warrior.  Though anyone who has been in war knows the often randomness of the killing. 

War was a common part of life in those days, and nations were reliant on their armies for protection. 

David, having experienced and led wars for much of his life, says differently. It was not the size or the might of an army that was important.  It was God’s help that makes the difference. 

Eight times in the life of David it records that David inquired of the Lord before taking action.  (I Samuel 23:2,4,6,9-12,30:8, II Samuel 5:19,23)  I think it would be a mistake to think that those were the only times.  Something that showed itself to be of such immense importance on 8 occasions would be important all the time.

People who know God often need to be reminded to judge the likelihood of success to be more dependent on God than on what humans can do, whatever they are doing.