Week 4
Genesis 41-50; Psalm 24, 25, 108; Mark 16; Galatians 1-4
Genesis 41-50
We pick up the story of Joseph. When we left Israel (having been newly renamed from "deceiver"), he has returned from Haran, confronted his brother Esau, been reconciled to Esau through great forgiveness, and God has told him to go back to Bethel where Jacob will worship God. God will reaffirm his covenant by saying, (35:10) "Your name is Jacob; no longer shall you be called Jacob but Israel shall be your name." God said to him, "I am God Almighty; be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall spring from you. the land that I give your offspring after you."
So all is settled for Jacob in a way. God has brought him back to Canaan as He had promised, and he has returned with great wealth, great family, and the beginnings of the nation of Israel, and has received the forgiveness of his brother Esau. Now his troubles will turn to another sort - grief at the loss of a child, as it is reported back to him that his favorite son, Joseph (Rachel's eldest son), has gone missing and the blood on his robes indicates that he met a violent death. But the reader knows that Joseph has been sold by his brothers to slave traders in Dothan (a major trading route going through the land bridge of Canaan). Potiphar, an official in Pharaoh's court will buy Joseph and thus begins Joseph's story in Egypt.
A few notes about Joseph's story:
Joseph clearly has a love for God and hears from God. We know this by his ability to dream and interpret dreams. In his younger years, however, he doesn't know when to keep his mouth shut when God reveals to him through dreams, that all his brothers will bow down to him. He appears at this stage arrogant and a braggart. However, in Potiphar's court, Joseph is highly favored by God. What does this mean? He obviously was good at whatever he did. he was savy in business and God's eye was upon him and caused him to be favored by those around him. his integrity of heart will be questioned by his temptation of Potiphar's wife who will make a sexual advance toward him, trying to lure him into adultery. I love Joseph's response and it is instructive for us all when we suffer temptation to sin. Sexual sin is a great temptation. The flesh is certainly weak in these areas. How does Joseph resist? The scriptures say he literally runs away from the temptation. He doesn't hang around to experiment, he gets the heck out of there. He sees this kind of sin as a betrayal of trust on two levels: he would betray Potiphar's trust, who has himself entrusted Joseph, a slave, with enormous authority and power. And he sees it as betraying God's trust. And really that's what the sin of adultery is, a betrayal of human trust and God's trust. A man of great integrity.
Sometimes our righteous actions and successful avoidance of temptation can cause vindictive responses. Potiphar's wife will get back at Joseph for this "humiliation" and accuse him of propositioning her. It is BECAUSE of Joseph's righteous actions that he will find himself the object of spite and vengeance and find himself in prison for many years. This can and will happen to the righteous. The darkness hates the light and will lash out toward the light in vengeful ways.
Joseph displays great humility toward God. When Joseph is questioned about his ability to interpret dreams, he gives all the credit to God. "Interpretation belongs to God alone". He does not pretend to possess any greatness in and of himself. And when Joseph finds favor with Pharaoh, and is given all Egypt except the throne of Pharaoh himself, Joseph will intentionally name his sons Manasseh ("for God has made me forget all my hardship") and Ephraim ("for God has made me fruitful in the land of my misfortunes.") When things are going our way and we become prosperous, it is very easy to forget God. It takes great humility to recognize that God is the source of all your great blessing.
Lessons in forgiveness: Joseph has an uncanny (and very spiritual) ability to look at life's situations and see God's providential hand in it all. This allows him the unnatural (but very spiritual) ability to forgive his brothers for their serious and grave wrongdoing against him. Sometimes, in order to forgive people, we try to lesson their evil and reclassify it for them, to help them not feel as guilty or to help ourselves get over it. Joseph doesn't do that. He says what they did is evil and it is not good. However, he trusts in a God whose providential hand used their evil to work out good in all their lives. And this really is the greatness of God. he certainly allows evil to exist in this world, but He is sovereign over it and actually uses it for his good purposes and glory. God always has the last word, the final word and that word is Holy, Just, and Good. Because Joseph can see his brother's great evil through the eyes of God, he does not need to exact vengeance on them. He can forgive because he sees God intended it to bless many others.
Lessons in suffering: the brutal reality of suffering is the injustice of it all. What happened to Joseph was unjust on every level. He didn't deserve any of it. Suffering can seem agonizing, as if God is delaying. We focus greatly on the length and timing of our suffering. But the bedrock to Joseph's time in prison and rejection by his brothers, seems to have been this simple phrase, "the Lord was with Joseph". Clearly, Joseph felt a sense of God's presence with him through the suffering. And Joseph is able to rejoice in his suffering when he is in a position of power to restore and forgive his brothers, because he is able to see the great goodness that came out of his suffering. Joseph's story teaches us that suffering has great purpose in our lives. For the one who loves God, suffering shapes character, develops perseverance, increases faith, and deepens trust .
Judah turns out to be a great guy. We see a transformation in his character from the man who married a Canaanite woman and kept his Canaanite daughter-in-law from her rights to the leverite law in marrying his youngest son, from the man who slept with what he thought was a "temple prostitute", to now someone of transformational character. At his point of change, he is taking responsibility for his sinful actions against Joseph to his father Israel, by offering himself in place of Benjamin should anything happen to Benjamin in Egypt. And as he stands before Joseph (still doesn't know it's Joseph), Judah says he will give his life for the younger. He would rather give himself to Joseph as a slave then see his father die from grief. He has turned into a self-giving person. This is a complete reversal from what we saw in the old Judah who didn't seem to care what his father thought.
The promise rolls on. God can override evil intention of people, individuals, and nations, in order to bring his promises to fruition. God will work through faithful humans, those who hearts are in tuned to God. God's promise to bring material blessing to Abraham and his family is happening here. Israel in Goshen will become extremely prosperous. God has saved Israel and his family from famine and provided more than they could ever imagine. God's hand is in it to save this family. Also, the promise to bless the nations through Abraham's family is also abundantly evident - for Egypt would have died without Joseph. The land would have been devasted, indeed the "whole world" would have been, for the famine extended from Canaan to Egypt and perhaps even Mesopotamia. God is using Israel to bless the world. God will reassure Israel in ch. 46 in a vision, "Jacob, Jacob, I am God, the God of your father; do not be afraid to go to down to Egypt, for I will make you into a great nation there. I myself will go down with you to Egypt, and I will also bring you up again; and Joseph's own hand shall close your eyes." Beautiful assurance by God that He remembers the promises and is on track to bring them to fruition. As we say good-bye to Israel, we stand in awe at the great funeral procession, really king-like, as Pharaoh's servants, the elders of his household, and all the elders of the land of Egypt, as well as all the household of Joseph, his brothers, so many people take his bones back to lie in the cave of Machpelah in Hebron where his ancestors were buried. What honor is bestowed the father of the 12 tribes. Galatians:
Notes on Paul first.
His letters assume his audience knows certain things. Therefore, it is important to know his audience and the context in which he is writing. He is not writing a theological treatise. Rather, he is addressing concerns at each place and assuming a lot of knowledge along with that. Sometimes we don't have this knowledge when we read them so we misunderstand a lot of context. His letters are very heavy and oftentimes complicated theologically… graduate level courses.
This is one of his earliest letters, if not his earliest. It is written to churches in the Galatian region. All of Paul's letters address specific problems in the churches or the regions he is addressing. In this letter, Paul is clearly highly disturbed by false doctrine and teachers that have come in to distort the gospel he first declared to them. He says they are "quickly turning away" or "quickly deserting" God to follow a different gospel. And he calls people that teach false doctrine "accursed". They are attempting to require Gentile Christians to adopt Jewish practices as part of their newfound faith. It appears that they are requiring new Christians to be circumcised, to eat certain foods deemed "clean" by the Jews, and observe special feast days that were important to the Jews. In other words, to be a Christian, you must first become a Jew. This launches Paul on a big theological argument about the relationship of law and faith.
In the face of false teachers that are leading them astray, Paul emphasizes his own God given apostleship so that they will take his warnings seriously. He begins to defend himself.
Paul's defense of himself: His defense of his own apostleship involves a repeated emphasis on the fact that no other human taught him the gospel. His whole experience rests on the revelation he received from the risen Lord Jesus on the road to Damascus. Although he had been a zealous Jew, following the letter of the law in every way, Jesus chose him. Jesus chose him to be his apostle. It was based on nothing Paul had done that was righteous, because Paul was persecuting Jesus and the church. It was not based on his Jewish adherence to the law, but based on him being chosen for a great task. This meeting with the resurrected Lord caused a total reversal and a total revolution in Paul's thought world.
• After his conversion, we learn here in 1:16 that Paul did not go to Jerusalem to be taught by the other apostles; instead, he went away at once into Arabia, then Damascus. He waited 3 years to go up to Jerusalem to visit Peter. Paul is stressing the point here that his message and calling are based on divine revelation NOT any human teaching. During this time, he had to reevaluate everything he knew about Abraham, Moses, the law, the covenants, Messiah, Israel, everything in light of this new revelation from Jesus himself.
• His first meeting with Peter will be after three years from his conversion and this meeting will only last 15 days. He only met with Peter and James during this time. It appears this meeting was to share about his conversion experience.
• From Jerusalem he goes to Syria and Cilicia, and his reputation begins spreading among believers in Jerusalem because of the fruit of his ministry. He preaches there some 10 years. While he is there, Barnabas will go to look for Paul in Tarsus in order to take him to Antioch. They stay there one year together, teaching in the church there in Antioch.
• It was 14 years later, that Paul goes back to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus (Acts 11:27-30). This, he emphasizes is in response to a revelation to go. `It is here that his apostleship is "tested" in some way by the Jerusalem brothers. He passes the test. And they extend the right hand of fellowship to him and together agree (notice he is not sent, as if they have apostleship authority over him) and Barnabas and Titus to the Gentiles. This begins his first missionary journey to the Galatian churches.
• After this missionary journey, Peter comes to visit Paul in Antioch and Paul reports a very surprising situation between him and Peter where he retells a story of reprimanding Peter to his face in front of everyone else. This is because Peter is being a hypocrite. He himself lives apart from the law (apparently Peter is free to not adhere to Jewish law); however, when he comes to visit the Gentile Christians in Antioch, he is eating with them, completely unoffended by them, fully accepting of them in the fellowship of believers. That is, until "certain people came from James". James was probably one of the leaders, if not the leader of the Jerusalem church, where they adhered to kosher requirements. Once Peter became aware of their presence, he withdrew from the fellowship with the Gentile Christians. This in turn, caused others to withdraw from the fellowship with Gentiles, even Barnabas withdrew. For Paul, this must be called out because it promotes not only a challenge to the unity of the church between Gentile and Jew, but it also runs contrary to the whole gospel message. By denying table fellowship to the Gentiles, Peter was in effect declaring them to be second class citizens with the implication that the only way they would become first class citizens was to accept circumcision, as if circumcision was at first a requirement for salvation. Peter's conduct not only threatened the Church's unity, but it was a fundamental assault on the gospel message that we are justified before God by a system of FAITH not a system of law. And thus begins Paul's theological argument on justification by faith alone. These chapters are a defense of this one doctrine: justification by faith not by works of the law. The theme verses of Galatians is in 2:16, "yet we know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ." He explains that in the next verse further, "And we have come to believe in Christ Jesus so that we might be justified by faith in Christ, and not by doing the works of the law, because no one will be justified by the works of the law". GRACE IS THE ONLY MEANS OF OBTAINING A RIGHT STANDING BEFORE GOD. WE CAN'T WORK OR WORM OUR WAY INTO RIGHT STANDING WITH GOD. Martin Luther said, "Grace doesn't look for someone worthy, it creates worth… it makes the one that it touches lovely."
What does "justified" mean? Justification means "right standing before God", it has a legal, courtroom nuance - of being rendered "not guilty" by a judge. So this refers to our objective standing before God.
I want to highlight points Paul makes in his argument to defend this essential gospel truth that is under assault in these churches:
He argues based on the "foolish" Galatians personal experience with the Holy Spirit. They weren't Jewish or following Jewish law when they received the Holy Spirit. Paul is reminding them that they received the Holy Spirit once they believed the gospel. Paul himself was a Jew, and not a Gentile sinner, and yet he knows that he is justified by God through faith in Christ. And Paul is arguing, why would you want to add requirements of law onto yourself when you don't have to? Why would you go backwards and not forwards?
The mainstay of his argument is by a comparison and contrast of the covenant of Abraham and the law given at Mt. Sinai through Moses. In Paul's mindset, Abraham is the ultimate example of the obedience of faith. When he thinks of faith, he thinks of Abraham. Abraham was reckoned righteous by God because he believed the promises that God made to him. He was not reckoned righteous by God because of anything he did first. Paul writes that the Scriptures foresaw that the Gentiles would be reconciled to God through faith, and that is why all who believe are blessed with Abraham. Paul is arguing here between two systems: a FAITH system and a LAW system.
When a Jew thought about the promise to Abraham, they thought about a promise specific to the Jews - that God would bless them as a nation, give them land always, make them into a great nation, and all peoples of the earth will be blessed through them.
With time, the Jews saw themselves as the special nation, God's special children, that the land would always be theirs and that God would always protect them. Paul explains that the true essence of the promise to Abraham was that Abraham's descendants would be preserved so that Jesus ("the offspring") would come and all the spiritual blessings promised would be given to Jesus. Jesus was the recipient of the blessings (Paul argues this with the "offspring" of Abraham was singular, not plural, so God meant it to be Jesus as the offspring). Jesus was the inheritor of the blessings, not the Jews, Paul argues. Jesus, in turn, disseminates these blessing to everyone through the FAITH system. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that whosoever believes in Him might not perish but have eternal life". The role of the Jews then was to provide a cultural backdrop, a social system, into which Jesus could be born into the world. They were special in that sense, that Jesus, the savior of the world, was Jewish! And what were those blessings that Jesus imparts to the world? right standing with God (justification), the Holy Spirit which enables all people to overcome sin . Paul will argue that the FAITH system has always been the system through which God has operated. He is not inventing new doctrine. You become a son of Abraham, not by birthright, but through the system of FAITH. This system existed long before there was ever a difference between Jew and Gentile. So you don't need to be a Jew first, Paul argues… the real sons of Abraham are the ones who believe God as Abraham did.
The law, on the other hand, as represented by the Mosaic covenant is vastly inferior. For one, the law can't justify anyone because no one can observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law. The law itself says, "cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law". There is no grace in law. We have all fallen short. There is no one righteous, no not one. Any failure at any point of the law is deserving of condemnation. Paul will argue that just because the Mosaic covenant came after the Abrahamic covenant, it doesn't mean it is superior and nullifies the covenant with Abraham. Just the opposite, no promise of God can be nullified. It is impossible.
The logical question, then, is why the law? Why did God give Israel the law if it could not justify anyone? What is the purpose of the law? Is the law no good, then? Paul will describe the purpose of the law in both a negative and a positive way. Keep in mind, Paul is looking at the law through the lens of salvation history. The law had a purpose for a specific time in salvation history. A very important and necessary purpose.
a. In 3:19, Paul writes "it was added because of transgressions, until the offspring would come to whom the promise had been made". It seems Paul is saying the law was necessary to make wrongdoing a legal offense, to awaken a conviction of sin and guilt and thus a need of a savior. Therefore, the law has very limited abilities. It cannot offer salvation or life to anyone. Paul uses language to describe the scripture as "imprisoning all things under the power of sin, so that what was promised through faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe" (Gal. 3:22). The law, in essence, imprisoned us until the arrival of faith (the coming of Jesus).
b. The law is also described as our " disciplinarian " until Christ came. The law helps to keep us in an understanding of God's holy and righteous standards.
c. It is also described by Paul as our " custodian " or " guardian " until Christ came. In Roman times, the "custodian" was usually a slave who conducted the free-born youth to and from school and who superintended his conduct generally. In the same way, the law is meant to oversee our conduct until the right time, until we are ready to inherit as an adult child. BUT NOW IN THE FULLNESS OF TIME, GOD SENT HIS SON, BORN OF A WOMAN, UNDER THE LAW, IN ORDER TO REDEEM THOSE UNDER THE SAW SO THAT WE MIGHT RECEIVE ADOPTION AS CHILDREN. Since a custodian is no longer necessary when the child grows up, so the law has ceased to be valid, since believers are now full grown sons. the law, then, was a divinely appointed temporary measure to serve until Jesus came. Law doesn't change the promises or contradict them, it just works with the promise.
Summation: Here is the power of the gospel: the law reveals all your sins and how far away you are from being righteous. Jesus lives a perfect life and fulfills every single requirement of the law. He offers his perfect life to pay the price of our curse. Our curse is death because we can't uphold the law. Then Jesus promises to give the Holy Spirit to give people the power to overcome sin. So once the curse was removed (by Jesus himself becoming the curse), everyone could be blessed.
Paul argues that the Gentile Galatians now have rights as adopted heirs of the promise of Abraham. What are those rights? Justification before the father, and the reception of the Holy Spirit. You are now no longer children of the slave woman (Hagar), but children of the promise (Sarah). He uses the analogy of Hagar and Sarah to illustrate the difference between these two covenants. Hagar represents the covenant at Sinai, and Sarah represents the new Jerusalem, the new age that Jesus has brought in… the age of the new Jerusalem, the church. The new dispensation of faith: believers become sons of God through faith, since they are united by Christ by baptism, being constituted thereby as Abraham's true offspring, and therefore heirs of the promised inheritance. It's like marrying someone who is wealthy. You share in the wealth by marriage, not by merit. This is the essence of the gospel. This is the faith system. Baptism is your marriage ceremony where you are united with Christ and come into all the blessings.
Question on Mark 16:18, "And these signs will accompany those who believe; by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes in their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover".
A few things:
This is THE most disputed passage in the entire NT canon. Most scholars to not believe 16:9-20 to be original to Mark, but added later by an editor later. This is because the oldest manuscripts we have of Mark's gospel do not include these verses, but stop at v. 8. One can understand why an editor would not be happy with this ending. "So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." Not an inspiring way to end a gospel, which makes me believe that is the true ending! Mark's purpose was to identify who Jesus was. He presents his story as a mystery gospel with the Gentile centurion at the cross being the first human who fully recognizes Jesus as the Son of God. Mark's gospel is full of surprises and unusual twists. Because this is the most disputed text in the NT, I would never base any theology off of it.
But, what does it mean if we assume it to be true, even if it was added later? What if Jesus really said these things, what would they mean? Since there is no evidences anywhere in the early church of handling snakes and drinking poison as being used to prove signs of the kingdom of God having come, it could be that Jesus was talking about immediate signs the would be evident after Pentecost, the disciples themselves would experience. In Acts 1:2, the Holy Spirit is said to be giving the apostles instructions. Jesus presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during 40 days, speaking about the kingdom of God." Maybe during this time, these signs were used to convince them the kingdom of God had come. There is an instance in Acts 28 of Paul being bitten by a snake and all the town inhabitants thought he would surely die, but he fully recovers. All that to say, if these were Jesus' words, I'm not sure they relate to the present day to day church practices. That would not make sense. But they could have been used as early signs among the apostles to prove the kingdom of God had come in Jesus. That's my best guess! What to look for in Ephesians:
"Queen of the epistles"
Look for 3 themes:
Plan of salvation
Greater appreciation for the church and its purpose by God
Greater ability to see between the spiritual and the physical realm… as Christians we live in both worlds, and they are often in conflict with one another.