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Gen. 47
Pharaoh gave Jacob the best of the land of Egypt and even put some of Jacob’s family in charge of his own livestock. That was quite a life-saving favor for a family of foreigners, especially at a time when all the Egyptian natives had to sell their land to Pharaoh just to survive. Why did Pharaoh do such a thing for a group of people he didn’t even know? He didn’t owe Jacob anything, let alone such a remarkable gift. There was only one reason that Pharaoh did it. He did it because of their relationship to Joseph. If something sounds familiar about all of that, it should. God offers us the best of all He has – and He owns everything – not because of who we are or anything we have done. He gives us this remarkable gift of abundant life only because of our relationship to Jesus.
Luke 1:1-38
It is one thing to learn and know a truth. It is something else altogether to understand why that truth is true. This is the reason Luke wrote his book. Whoever Theophilus is, he evidently learned the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ at some point. However, Luke thought it would be good for this Theophilus to, “know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.” (Lk. 1:4). Luke wanted him to know the truth behind the truth.
I appreciate what Luke did with this. Theophilus does not sound like a Jewish name. So, rather than using a lot of Old Testament scripture – prophecies, Psalms, and Israel’s history – to show Jesus as the fulfillment of these things, Luke opted instead to tell Theophilus the events in the order they occurred and simply let the story speak for itself. Because he did this, it offers us one more perspective on God’s truth.
I love how God reveals Himself to us in so many different ways. He reveals Himself in creation, if we care to look and see. And He shows Himself in the stories, passed down through the ages from eyewitnesses, which we find in His word. If we care to look even deeper than either of these basic things, we find that God also reveals Himself in the Bible as a whole. We find that all those individual stories of all those various events weave together seamlessly to paint one cohesive picture. This picture tells the story of the relationship between God and man – how it started, its fracture, its restoration, and even the ‘happily ever after’. If you can’t see the hand of God in all of that, you aren’t really looking. If, however, you look with eyes to see, you will begin to understand why God’s truth is true.
Job 13
Job asked his friends, “Will you show partiality for [God]?” (Job 13:8a). That’s an interesting thought. How exactly does one show partiality for God? I have an idea about this, and Eugene Peterson’s translation in The Message seems to support it. He wrote, “Are you going to keep on lying ‘to do God a service’?” What I think Job meant by his statement is that we often give God attributes in an effort to make Him the God we want Him to be.
The fact is that there are some things about God’s character that are hard for us to accept. Job’s situation is a perfect example of this. People struggle with the thought that a good God would allow bad things to happen to innocent, underserving people. Job’s friends could not accept the reality of his situation. So they created their own reality – one that made God look better in their eyes. The problem, however, is not with God’s character. The problem is with human perspective. God doesn’t need us to show partiality for Him. He doesn’t want us to make Him look good. What He wants is for us to accept Him as the sovereign God that He is and acknowledge the limitations of our own understanding. And it seems to me that is precisely what Job did.