"Walk Humbly" by John Rice

Last Sunday Pastor Mike spoke on the topic of retaliation in reference to Matthew 5:38-42.   And yet again, Jesus, as He has done in all of His teachings during the Sermon on the Mount, shocks us with His invitation to look deeper into God’s heart. In this passage we look at justice and mercy.

When Jesus says, “You have heard it said…….but I say……”in verses 38 and 39 of the passage, it sounds like He is reversing what has been taught for generations under Moses’ Law. But as Mike pointed out, this wasn’t a reversal of the Law as much as it was the use of hyperbole to help us understand God’s fuller directive for us to love others.

God is the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:8); He doesn’t change from the Old Testament to the New Testament. His character is the same; His will for us is the same. So why does Jesus feel the need to make such a shocking re-direction of the Law as He does here? One idea would be that the people of His time had taken this piece of the Law and looked at it from only one angle, while being blinded to the other angle. More specifically, they understood the teaching about justice, but didn’t see the part about mercy.

Mike then quoted Micah 6:8, which to me is one of the most beautiful, succinct and powerful truths of scripture:

God has shown you, O man, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you,
but to act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God?

Doesn’t that kind of say it all? All over the Bible God is referred to as a God of justice. He hates lying lips and falsehoods. He hates oppression of the poor and false testimony. He hates deception. But He is also a God of mercy: He requires us to forgive those who wrong us and to help those in need. As always, we meet the tension between truth and grace. It seems we never get free of this tension. But how do we determine whether we are to act in justice or in mercy? When someone begs money from us, do we just give it without any further discernment? And if we are to refuse, how do we know that is God’s will for the situation?

I think the answer lies in the last phrase of Micah 6:8…… to walk humbly with your God.

If we walk humbly with our God, we get to know His voice better. We get to know His heart better. We get the loving instruction we need from a good, wise Father. Can we hear specific direction from Him on a given matter of our daily lives? I think we can. This was certainly an expectation from many of the people we read about in the Bible. For just one example, look at David. Of course, God’s voice is sometimes very quiet or perhaps He leads us by an inner sense of peace or intuition. Very few people I know have ever heard an audible voice. But as we continue to walk with God, to pray to Him, to converse with Him, to get godly counsel and to read His word, we will be able to be more confident that we know His will when we make decisions in our life, when we need to decide whether to walk a mile, or two, or twenty, with someone who asks us to go with him.

"The Old And the New" by John Rice

I heard a statement recently that really caught my attention. It went something like this:

“In the Old Testament if a Believer touched a leper, he was pronounced ‘unclean’ and had to be removed from the congregation. In the New Testament if a Believer touched a leper, the leper was healed.”

I have treasured the Old Testament all my Christian life and argued for its inclusion in the teachings of our modern day church, even defending it against those who would say it isn’t relevant to us Christians anymore. Some think of the Old Testament as just an old history book, which presents an angry, vengeful God who is Himself transformed in the New Testament by the coming of Jesus. I would still argue that this is a false conclusion and that while the Old Testament does record the history of ancient Israel, with all its struggles and battles, it also paints a picture of the true character of God and man.

God is characterized through his interactions with people as a patient, compassionate, wise, forgiving and loving God. In fact, the Lord describes Himself to Moses in Exodus 34:5-7 in this way: And God passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished.” David also describes the amazingly gracious character of God in his psalms, as does Isaiah and other prophets.

Even though the Old Testament is as much “God’s Word” as the New, what Jesus does when He comes to earth, born of a woman and very much human, yet equally divine, is truly world-changing. The New Testament speaks of a new covenant with God, which allows us to live in a radically different way from the way our brothers and sisters of the Old Covenant lived.

So back to the statement I heard recently, mentioned above, we see an example of this huge difference. In the book of Leviticus, chapter 14, we read what the Israelites were to do if anyone had an infectious disease. That person was to “wear torn clothes, let his hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of his face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’. As long as he has the infection he remains unclean. He must live alone; he must live outside the camp.” Now to be sure, this was an ingenious way to keep infectious diseases from spreading through the whole population in a time when there was little medical knowledge for a nomadic desert people. In fact, the requirement to shave and wash wasvery advanced hygiene in those days.

Nonetheless, contrast this to what Jesus did and instructed His disciples to do. He constantly laid hands on sick people and restored their health, their sight, their wholeness. Paul and the other apostles went around healing the sick, lame, diseased and possessed. The power which Jesus ministered in and with which He empowered His disciples, was the same power that raised Him from the dead after three days in a tomb. It was the power of God’s Holy Spirit, which Jesus sent to His people on earth during Pentecost 50 days after He had been resurrected.

God is the same God in the Old and New Testaments, but when Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit to live inside all of His followers who invited Him there, everything changed. I can’t even begin to understand what power lives inside me. I struggle with the faith for that sometimes. But I do know that God keeps His Word and that Jesus said we would do even greater works than He Himself did because of the Holy Spirit. I choose to believe Him and seek to open up to Him in every way He wants me too. Help me, Lord! Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven….and help me play my part!

Exodus 34:5-7

And God passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet He does not leave the guilty unpunished.”

John 14:12

I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in Me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.