January 26, 2015 Bible Study– Faith As Small As A Mustard Seed

For today, One Year Bible Online links here.

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Proverbs 5:7-14

    Stay away from immoral people, if you allow them to suck you into their immorality you will regret it. It may seem pleasing at first, but you will lose your honour and everything of value.

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Psalm 22:1-18

    This is the psalm which Jesus referenced when He hung on the cross and cried out “My God, My God why have you abandoned me?” According to tradition, when a rabbi, or teacher of Jewish law, quoted the first line of a passage of Scripture, he was quoting the entire passage. So, let’s take a look at the first part of this passage which Jesus quoted while on the cross. I will look at the rest tomorrow.
    The psalm reflects feelings of great despair. Yet, even in that despair, it gives glory to God and acknowledges the good He has done in the past. The psalmist expresses that he is in great pain from the scorn and mockery of those around him. They ask why, since he relies on God and claims God’s love, God does not save Him? In the Gospels we are told that the crowd around Jesus echoed verse 8 of this psalm. The psalmist (and Jesus by referencing this psalm) declares that it was God who brought him safely from his mother’s womb. God has been his God since birth. This portion of this psalm is both a statement of despair and one of great faith.

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Matthew 17:10-27

    When the father brought his son to Jesus to request healing and tells Him that the disciples had been unable to heal the boy, Jesus expresses anger. It is not clear to me what Jesus was angry about. It is unclear to me why Jesus is angry. Based on what He says after healing the boy there are two possibilities that I can see, but I am not sure which is true, or whether there is some further explanation which has not occurred to me. The first possibility is that Jesus is angry with His disciples because they did not have enough faith to heal the boy. The second possibility is that He was angry because the father did not have faith that the disciples could heal the boy.
    Jesus follows this up with telling His disciples that if they had faith no larger than a mustard seed, they could tell a mountain to move, and it would move. I truly believe that this is true. However, I believe that if you have faith that it is God’s will for that mountain to move, you will do more than tell it to move. You will grab a shovel and start digging, or hire an earth mover if you can afford one. If your faith tells you that something needs to be done, you won’t wait for God to perform a miracle, you will start doing whatever is within your power to accomplish that something. If you grab a shovel and start digging, that mountain WILL     Let us look for the “mountains” in this world that God wants moved and grab our shovels! Let’s stop worrying that we do not have “enough” to complete the task and do what is within our power, trusting God to provide the difference. Remember the feeding of the 5,000 and the 4,000.

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Exodus 2:11-3:22

    In many ways this passage is the perfect counterpoint to what I just said about faith. In this passage, Moses went to visit his people. He recognized their suffering and acted in an attempt to relive that suffering. Things did not work out as he had planned and he had to flee Egypt. Forty years later, God appeared to Moses in a burning bush and told him it was time to return to Egypt and lead His (and his) people out of Egypt. The first time did not work out because it was not yet God’s time.
    When God called Moses to return to Egypt, Moses resisted the call. He had learned the wrong lesson from his earlier failure. The lesson Moses learned from his first failure was that he was not the person to lead the Israelites. As I said, this was the wrong lesson. The problem with Moses first attempt to lead the people of Israel was that he tried to do it on his own (and, perhaps, it was not yet God’s time). So, when we grab that “shovel” I talked about in the previous section, let’s remember that we are not going to accomplish the task. We are merely providing our hands to do God’s work. A second thing for us to keep in mind is that we should approach such things prayerfully to make sure that it is God’s will that this “mountain” move. Let us remember that, perhaps, it is not yet God’s time for that mountain to move.