For a full description of the (Y4) reading plan, see the “About” page.
Ex. 8
God’s message to Pharaoh was, “Let my people go, that they may serve Me.” (Ex. 8:1b). Let me see if I can articulate the thought that came into my mind when I read that this morning. It made me think that, in order to truly serve God, we need to leave where we are. I don’t mean our physical location – we can obviously serve God from anywhere. What I mean is that we can’t stay enslaved to our sin; the desires of our flesh; our human condition. We simply cannot say that we serve God while we remain enslaved to another. We need to get out of Egypt.
Luke 11
I can’t seem to get away from thinking about the mysteries of God. When I first mentioned it a few days back, I said that Jesus is the cipher to every mystery. So today, when I read, “Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering.” (Lk. 11:52), that’s where my thoughts went. The Jewish leaders rejected Jesus, the key of knowledge, favoring their own perceived wisdom, which wasn’t wisdom at all.
Job 25-26
Bildad asked a rhetorical question. He said, “How then can a man be just with God? Or how can he be clean who is born of woman?” (Job 25:4). He stressed his point with some poetic comparison, ending with the statement, “How much less man, that maggot, and the son of man, that worm!” (Job 25:6). A thought flickered through my mind when I read that statement.
The thought came from Psalm 22:6a, “But I am a worm and not a man”. That Psalm is very prophetic of the death of Jesus, who is the Son of Man. In looking up that passage, I also ran across Isaiah 41:14. That verse says, “’Do not fear, you worm, Jacob, you men of Israel; I will help you’, declares the Lord, ‘and your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel.’” So what I see in Bildad’s short sermon to Job is a glimpse of God’s plan for us; a plan neither Job nor his friends knew. Jesus, the Son of Man, became a worm to redeem the rest of us worms so that we can be just with God.