Artwork by Lucie Beardwood
This morning I was reading Scripture. From the Old Testament I was reading Numbers and in the New Testament I was reading John. In Numbers chapter 15 we find this story…
An Israelite guy was gathering sticks on the Sabbath. This was forbidden. The guy got caught and was taken into custody. Moses inquired of Yahweh what should be done. Yahweh told Moses that the guy had to be killed. So the stick-gathering Sabbath-breaker was taken outside the camp and stoned to death by the congregation of Israel. Sticks and stones. (Number 15:32–36)
Next I read from the Gospel of John chapter 5. This is what happens…
Jesus meets a guy who has been paralyzed for 38 years. Jesus tells the guy to take up his bed and walk. The man is healed, takes up his bed, and heads for home. But this was the Sabbath. And the guy gets busted for breaking the Sabbath. When the Judean Torah enthusiasts find out that it was Jesus who was behind all this Sabbath breaking, they are prepared to kill Jesus. (Like Moses did in the Bible.) John concludes the story like this…
“This is why the Judeans were persecuting Jesus, because he was doing these things on the Sabbath. But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is working until now, and I am working.’ This is why the Judeans were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.” (John 5:16–18)
Great actice! That was quite obvious to me when I first picked up the Bible about 25 years ago. Since then I've seen many Christians avoid this issue, but the Bible itself says: 'No one knows the Father but the Son...' That's actually the very essence of Christianity. Jesus is the full revelation of Who our Abba is, everything else is just simply a 'in part' revelation.
A quote from George MacDonald comes to mind: "All those evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness have their origin in the brains of the wise and prudent, not in the hearts of children."
Posted by: Florian Berndt | May 12, 2014 at 02:39 AM