For today, One Year Bible Online links here.
Everyone wants to be friends with the rich, but everyone looks down on the poor. There are those who think that if only the poor would apply themselves they would no longer be poor. But far worse are those who think the poor are like children who need to be looked after and taken care of by their betters. It is a sin to despise your neighbor (and remember who Jesus says your neighbor is). This translation says that those who help the poor will be blessed. I prefer the NIV for that part. There it says that those who are kind to the needy are blessed. The difference being that one can “help the poor” in many ways, but being kind requires direct interaction and involves responding to the specific needs/wants of a specific individual.
This psalm continues the theme of letting all that I am praise the Lord. This psalm speaks of God’s grandeur and of how all of His creation is wonderfully made. I will not try to summarize nor comment on it here. This psalm does too good and beautiful of a job for that. Please read it for yourself. The only thing I will add is that the psalmist is telling us how God set the entire world up as a feedback system to maintain itself and correct for things getting out of balance.
We are all the products of what has happened to us in the past. How are parents treated us. What we learned from those around us, often lessons which no one intended to teach us. Obviously the largest influence on who we are as people is our parents, whether that is through the way they raised us, or through their abdication of that responsibility to others. However, there are other influences as well, our teachers in school, the friends and acquaintances we have made and met over the years, events going on in the world around us. All of these things shape us, both for good and for bad, starting at our birth. Their were people and events which occurred before we have any memory which have shaped who we are today.
In today’s passage, Jesus tells us that we must be born again. What He is telling us is that we must allow the Holy Spirit to erase those influences. In order to enter into the Kingdom of God, we must be willing to let go of the lessons we have learned over our life time. We must learn new lessons and be shaped into new people. The Holy Spirit will undo the events of the past to transform us, if we allow it to happen. We need to let go of the negative things which happened to us in the past. We need to allow the Holy Spirit to transform us so that we can live as if those things never happened.
The lesson of this passage is summed up by verse 6, “all the people did whatever seemed right in their own eyes.” Micah stole from his own mother and returned the money to her to avoid her curse. She took the returned money and commissioned an idol. Micah set up a shrine for the idol and installed one of his sons as a priest. Then, he convinced a Levite to take over as priest in his shrine. Micah was convinced that because he had a Levite as priest in his shrine that God would bless him. It never entered his head to consider that neither he, nor his priest, were worshiping God. He did what he thought was right.
One day, some members of the tribe of Dan came upon Micah and met his priest. They recognized that the priest was a Levite and questioned him about what he was doing there. After completing their scouting mission, they came to Micah’s house with a large number of warriors and stole the idols and implements from Micah’s shrine. When the Levite confronted them, they offered him a better position with them than with Micah. He accepted and they went on their way. When Micah came after them to recover his stolen property, they made it clear that they had sufficient force to prevent him from taking back what was his. They did what they thought was right. They believed that God would bless them because they had the idols which Micah had made and the Levite to act as their priest.
How often do we check our actions against what God has said in Scripture, or with our fellow believers? Certainly as we look at society around us we can see how many people do what is right in their own eyes. And in many cases, we can see how it is wrong, but what about us? Do we do what is right in our own eyes? Or what is right in God’s eyes?