Jesus won the victory so we could talk to each other in church

The work of Jesus Christ is one event and a sequence of events. At its heart is the cross, with its cries of abandonment ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!") and of victory ("It is finished!"). There at the Cross, the true Man committed himself decisively and finally to the path of 'obedience unto death', and in so doing overturned the act of disobedience of the other Man in whom we all died. 

But the cross, while central, is not the totality. Evangelical theologians have sometimes had less to say about the resurrection or ascension, but these are vital scenes too, as the victory is confirmed and published and rewarded. Sin and death and hell will not have the final say; Satan will not have the victory. The resurrection is the first roar of Judgement Day, God's mighty 'No!' against human injustice and all that raises itself up against him. That 'No' declares the end of sin; that 'No' announces the Judge. 

But then, the King ascends. He has the victory, he takes the spoils, and he sits down at the heart of the majestic glory. As High Priest he enters the heavenly Holiest Place on our behalf and intercedes for his people. And as Prophet, he speaks. 

Those facets of his ministry are all visible in the final once-and-for-all act of his earthly work – the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost. The one who has won the victory over sin has the right to redeem sinners from their captivity, to bring them into his victorious army, and to empower and enable them to serve. He intercedes with the Father and the Spirit is poured out. The initial chosen few begin to speak, and the last battle begins. The church makes war by the Word; the church understands, believes and speaks because the Spirit has come; the Spirit has come because Jesus Christ has won the victory. 

That is the reason for the crucial but often overlooked or skipped-over section in Eph 4:7-10. 

Paul wants to give the Ephesian believers every reason not to drift back to their former life as pagan occultists. As it is for every Christian, the most common temptation is to slide back to what they were before they met Jesus. Backsliding is generally exactly what it says – sliding back. In the Ephesians’ case, it happens to have been a life of magic, Spiritism and esoteric religion.

Every part of the letter is geared to stopping them slip back to that – to show that what they enjoy in Christ is infinitely bigger, better and more thrilling than anything they had before in their occult groups. Nowhere might that be more of an acute challenge than in the Christian meeting itself. Compared to drunken sacrifices of bulls, and to nakedness and orgies as a means of experiencing spiritual awakening, groups of people meeting to eat, pray, and to talk and discuss the Jewish scriptures must have seemed rather tame.  

It isn’t tame, says Paul. Any communication of the gospel, any pre-echo of the voice of Jesus that will be heard on the last day, any Spirit-driven word... all is the result of Jesus’ decisive victory. That applies to the once-and-for-all laying down of the definitive revelation of the gospel, through the apostles and prophets. It applies to the ongoing work of proclaiming and applying that gospel, by the evangelists and shepherds-and-teachers. And it applies to the work of every believer as all of us, in conversation and fellowship, encourage and help one another to grow in our faith.  

When Christian people meet and speak the truth – the real truth, the actual gospel – to each other, we are seeing the spoils of Jesus’ war. What we are seeing is the product of a divine invasion, an incursion. A powerful One came from outside and supernaturally intervened in a dark empire. Citizens who had been comfortable in this world were turned into rebels against this world – for they are now citizens of a new and as yet not-fully-seen kingdom. Jesus turned sinners into saints. He made the ignorant into the knowing and blasphemers into preachers. The gathering of these rebel forces is called “church”. 

The way in which this rebel movement grows is called evangelism – speaking the truth about Jesus so that other people are convinced and join up. And the way the passion and purity and power of the lives of the rebels is built up is by… talking to each other. Hearing pastors and teachers explain and apply the apostles’ and prophets’ teaching, discussing that and applying that to one another, that is the battlefield diet of an advancing and powerful army. In re-telling the gospel and its implications is nutrition and life and energy and transforming power. Mutually teaching each other the Bible is the essential basis for spiritual warfare – the battle for holiness.

Don’t be taken in by the suggestion that words are peripheral – whether to evangelism or to the life of the church. If Francis of Assisi really said “Preach Jesus – if necessary, use words!” he was no saint – but then, he never said that! Don’t be taken in by the idea that images or actions are central to our meetings. Words are. In the Salvation Army we rejected the two officially sanctioned faith-feeding visual actions early in our history; ironically the resultant vacuum has made us so hungry for the visual and physical and so inventive of secondary symbols and sacraments that the word has been at a disadvantage among us ever since. I don’t know if we will ever be able to reinstate baptism and the supper as catalysing co-workers of the word; I don’t doubt that the dethroning of the word is one of the things that is killing us. As a church we are dying of starvation. The Salvation Army is rejecting the gifts that its Saviour paid for!

The Authorised Version used the word “conversation” to describe something much broader than “talking” – it was the whole lifestyle of believers. And yet the word made a profound link between word and life: a church in its living will never rise above the quality of its talking. You have to walk the talk, but you can’t not talk. Jesus died and rose and ascended so that we could talk in church. Never underestimate the wonder of that. The Christian meeting is the counter-cultural, subversive, perturbing sign in this present world of his victory won – and of his coming return. 

See you on Sunday! 

We must be careful not to worship the Bible...

If a woman is in love with a man, and he writes letters and cards, and she keeps them all in a special place and gets them out and re-reads them carefully many times paying great attention to the wording and the lovely way he writes - does she love the letters or does she love the man? 

And if she reads the letters once and chucks them in the bin, or is always talking about how inconsistent they are, and poking holes, what would we think about her love for the man?

The slightest hint of strong respect for the Bible, the idea that it can actually be viewed (while taking into account the diversity of its human history, genres, language and culture) as One Book with One Author, the notion that this Author may have overruled its production such that it is true and authoritative - I hear all of these being met almost as a routine, knee-jerk reaction with the statement, "We must be careful not to end up worshipping the Bible." 

I think it is a total non sequitur. It just makes no sense. I don't worship the Bible. I never have. I happen to believe in a big, powerful and gracious God who can use sinners to write something that faithfully reveals him, that's all. I'm so thankful that he is so great, and I worship him. 

A whole library of books?

"The Bible is not a book, but a whole library of books."

In recent years it has become more and more common to say that the Bible is not a single book, but a whole library of books. This assertion is sometimes put as if it were a new insight, and it is put strongly, combatively, as if it were very important, crucial to the battle for Christianity in the post modern world. 

At the heart of the assertion is the idea that the Bible speaks with many voices that are to some degree in disagreement with each other.  Human authorship in its diversity leads inevitably to discordant voices, especially given the cultural, linguistic, chronological and geographical spread involved. 

The immediate effect of this is that the authority of any part of the scriptures can be waved away relatively easily. Not long ago, in a paper aimed at showing, say, that Romans 1 had nothing to say regarding modern homosexual relationships, attention was paid to the exact Greek words used and their interpretation. Now, with an acceptance that Jesus and Paul have essentially different messages, it is sufficient to classify the latter as the author of some "letters from 2000 years ago" and ditch him without further debate. If this is true of the Pauline corpus, how much more so of the older Testament...

The first thing that can be said about all this is that an awareness of diversity within Scripture isn't actually new at all. All careful students of the Bible, from Chrysostom to Calvin and up to the present, have observed that diversity of genre, cultural background and theological emphasis of the various writings. Indeed, good exegesis has been in large part precisely the struggle to interpret scripture in a way that does justice to its historical and diverse nature. It was understood that God had spoken through history in a progressive way and in diversified forms - a conviction that perhaps had its roots in Heb 1:1? - and that respect for that diversity was an essential key to hearing his voice. 

If there was a sea change in the thinking about the nature of scripture, it wasn't particularly recent. It was in the 19th century that scholars began to teach the human authorship of the Bible  in a way which downplayed or denied the divine element. It was in that period that the idea of incompatible theologies, of discordant voices, of irreconcilable differences between texts began to come in. Although lone voices had said some of these things before, the 19th century saw a new acceptability and broader consensus, at least in the universities, that scripture must be read in a way that effectively ruled out looking for a common thread of truth from a self-consistent God. Human authorship, not divine, became the sole principle governing interpretation. 

The recent development has been that such thinking has started to come into parts of the church which have been regarded as evangelical, and some of which still wish to regard themselves and be regarded as evangelical. That is new. It is part of a trend that has been going on for a while, with the goalposts continuously on the move, but this element represents a further stage of the outcropping of 19th century liberalism into mainstream, evangelical church life.  

This is a disaster. It would be hard to overstate the corrosive, poisonous effects of such a line of thought. It is destructive of Christian Faith at its very heart, makes preaching all but impossible, and leaves the church adrift on the chaotic cross-currents of postmodernity. Or, to put it another way, it is the intellectual leaders' desire to appease and to live happily with the postmodern world that is stealing the bread of heaven from the mouth of the congregations of believers. 

It doesn't square with Jesus' attitude to Scripture. 

If we allow that the gospel narratives paint in any way a coherent and authoritative picture of Jesus, then we have to take on board his attitude to the OT scriptures if we want to be his disciples.  (I am aware that there is a school of thought which denies any such coherence or historical authenticity to the gospels, but if we can't believe in that Jesus, then there is no Jesus who we can believe in and Christianity slips through our fingers completely.) 

One repeated motif of the gospels is Jesus' self-awareness as both being and achieving the fulfilment of the scriptures. Although at times it is the gospel narrator who sees an event happening "in fulfilment", at others the idea is put on Jesus' own lips. Perhaps the classic passage is Luke 24, where the resurrection is explained as being the fulfilment of Jesus' own words (6-8) but also as fulfilment of the OT scriptures. These are classically, Jewishly, classified into their three great divisions - Moses/Torah, Prophets and Psalms/Writings.  

Jesus sees those divisions as speaking with a united voice, and he sees himself as the subject of their message. He does not give a hint that Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms have different voices, or that they are of unequal value, or that one part speaks of him but others don't. He affirms that all the sections - indeed, "all the Scriptures" v27 cf. 45 - speak of him. In fact, in the light of v45 we can arguably go further - for Jesus and then for his disciples, to understand the scriptures is precisely to understand how, with one voice, they speak of him. 

Undergirding this understanding is the awareness that behind the human authors, in all their diversity of content, culture, genre and style, is a single Author, who reveals himself in a coherent, self-consistent and progressive way through the writings of many human authors. When Jesus speaks of the "Word of God" in Luke 11:28, whatever Christological resonances we may be tempted to find, our primary understanding must be that, like any Jew of his time, he is referring to the scriptures and to the  the Torah specifically. 

Such an attitude continues through from Jesus into the rest of the NT. For Jesus, "what Scripture says, God says" and his followers show the same attitude. To take just one example: the interplay of "authorship awareness" in Hebrews 3 and 4 is well-known. Here "it is said", "David said", "the Holy Spirit says" and "God spoke" swirl around one another in reference to the same texts. There is no felt clash between human authorship, in its historically conditioned singularity, and divine authorship, in its overarching coherence. 

The point is that Christian faith, being the faith that is centred on the person, words and work of Jesus, includes at its heart his own attitude to the OT scriptures. For Jesus to describe the OT as "a library of books" with a denial of a singular, overarching Authorship is simply impossible to imagine. This view parts company with Christian Faith because it parts company with Jesus himself. 

This "library of books" attitude to the Bible is more pervasive now than at any time I can remember. Its effects are all around us, even in the lips and in the behaviour of believers who might hesitate to articulate it directly. The impact can be seen in various, interlinked ways. 

1) With regard to the Bible itself, we are distanced from the weight of the text. 

The authority of scripture may still be affirmed in our Doctrines, but in practice it is now wholly absent. This is a direct outworking of this view - if the Bible has no one voice, no one message, then it really has nothing to say to us that we have to hear and heed, trust and obey. Any part can be set off against any other part, and we have become the final arbiters, ruling over the text and deciding what we want to obey. 

2) With regard to God, we have never been freer to shift our understanding of who he is.

I remember a young woman in Brazil telling me that her God was "fofinho" - fluffy and cuddly. That kind of view of God now pervades the church and even its candidates for ministry. The God who is "consuming fire" can be marginalised and then lost completely, for the texts that speak in that way are surely contradicted somewhere else! With a multi-voiced Bible we have a voiceless Bible, and we are free to redefine God in whatever way we like. Not for nothing did Don Carson title his great book on postmodernism in the church, "The Gagging of God" - a self-contradictory, multi-voiced book gives no voice to the Lord at all. Suddenly "God" is sounding strikingly similar to the rest of the flood of politically corrected, social-media-ready material. The God of scripture has been silenced, to be replaced by the filtered, sickly-sweet quotes from meme-gurus. 

3) With regard to ourselves, it makes us arrogant and intellectually lazy

The traditional task of the Christian teacher/preacher was a challenging one. The Bible is a complex book, and its interpretation is hard work. Our calling to that hard work began in faith, as we receive Christ and receive his understanding of the way the Scriptures speak of him. Believing that all Scripture is God-breathed and that it is able to make us wise for salvation in Jesus is a matter of faith, of course, but having taken that step of faith, hard, humble work lies ahead as we attempt to sit under the text and work out how it is speaking of him. Down through the centuries preachers and believing scholars can testify to the sweat and satisfaction of toiling at the Bible, and finding, in fellowship with great exegetes who have gone before, that there really is one message, one coherent Voice, one Subject, one Speaker.  

But now, we don't need to do that any more. We are at liberty to ignore - simply never read or refer to - whole swathes of the Bible that are deemed sub-christian. Our work is now easy, for all we have to do is regurgitate the attitudes of the politically corrected gospel week on week and never be disturbed or disturb anyone with tougher or more uncomfortable passages. 

What claims to be a movement driven by intellectual honesty ends up being the exact reverse. It is the excuse for not grappling with the book of God. And it is far more honest to say, "I don't fully understand this section" than to take on the lofty tones of the "scholar" and tell your congregation that a passage has nothing to say to us for it has nothing to do with Jesus or his message. The former way is humble ignorance; the latter is the height of arrogance. 

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  

We need a return to the Bible. To the Bible as a book that - yes - is complex and historically, culturally, geographically and humanly diverse, but which is also One Book for it comes from One God and speaks of One Saviour. And we need to rediscover that united text not as an intellectual curiosity but as the unique bearer of the Message which calls us to faith and obedience to Jesus Christ. May God help us! 

A rich relative come to stay...

Colossians 3:16 Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly...

The church in Colossae was being perturbed. Upset. Thrown about a bit. We have to deduce exactly how by reading between the lines of Paul's letter - we have no other data to go on. It seems that teaching had crept in which had a legalistic streak, taking some Old Testament requirements and imposing them on Christians, perhaps not as a basis of salvation but certainly as a basis of spiritual one-upmanship, of graduation into the premier league of those who enjoyed "fullness". The language was impressive, and, as these things so often do, invited ordinary believers into an apparently higher experience, while in the process being rather dismissive of the "basics" of the Christian life. Deeper knowledge, perhaps contact with angels, a more erudite view of Jesus - who wouldn't be tempted?! Not least when the mystical, even magical, elements to these views seemed more in tune with many of the currents in wider society. The promise of a Higher Life while simultaneously being less counter-cultural will always appeal! 

Paul's answer to all of this is, as ever, to see more of Jesus. To appreciate his greatness, his grace, his glory, his sufficiency, his excellence. He knows that there is nothing these believers need more than a fuller appreciation of what they already have in Christ.  And that solution is always the answer whenever exclusive, gnostic, esoteric, ascetic or other promises of "something special" infect the church and rob it of its fundamental joy in the gospel. When the church loses its gospel joy it ALWAYS becomes less effective in serving the world by getting the message out. 

In our readings this morning we came to the verse above. In a sense it is just a part of the overall solution that Paul is putting to the Colossians. But it is a very interesting part, and I love the way he puts it. 

It is parallel with a very similar passage in the letter to the Ephesians which stresses being filled with the Spirit, and therefore teaching one another scripture through our singing. The Ephesians faced some similar but distinctive challenges, and I don't doubt that the wording is carefully nuanced in each case.  

The Colossians needed to recalibrate their attitude to the Bible. By "the word of Christ" Paul means the gospel, certainly, the message of scripture, not simple the Bible as a book. But as the following words make clear, that message cannot be divorced from scripture itself, if (at the least) the inclusion of the Psalms is anything to go by. Paul is against a wrong, unChristly use of scripture. The false teachers were using the Book as the source for their various Jewish emphases; the believers were inclined  to judge one another over fasts and feast days. They were not reading the scriptures and finding the supreme and sufficient Christ in them. Over against such wrong use Paul wanted to encourage right use. The Bible is read right when we find "the Word of Christ" in it.  

Not for the last time in church history, someone was pushing these Christians towards an attitude which took Christ out of the scriptures. For the Colossians, the OT was a source book for the imposed rules of new prophets who Really Knew God. At other times a critical attitude has denied the essential unity of scripture as Word of Christ - it becomes a book of ancient curiosities. When scripture is at best a blast from the past,  the Now Experience or the New Scholarship is so much more attractive! Such an influence rarely damns the Bible as such - it just sidelines it. And so the Christ of scripture gets sidelined too. 

Against that backdrop, Paul wants the church to revel in talking - and singing - scripture, and to do so in the understanding that the word of scripture is Christ's. It comes from the great Christ he has been talking about, and it speaks of the great Christ he has been talking about. 

He uses the phrase "dwell richly". He says, "Let the Word, the message of the Scriptures, the Book of Jesus, be to you like having a rich relative come to stay. Think of the special treats, the outings, the great restaurant meals, the generally better lifestyle when Uncle Bartholomew stays over - let the Bible be like that among you! Don't look for your fullness elsewhere - let the scripture, let the gospel raise your standard of living!"

In our day too, we are offered attractive versions of the Christian life which claim to be holy and to reach greater heights of love and intimacy with God, while simultaneously downplaying scripture and cosying up to the prevailing culture. The Word of the Bible is not viewed as a rich and generous relative. It is viewed as a rather fusty, musty, picky and embarrassing old person. We wouldn't want to enter into dialogue with postmoderns while we've got her in tow! She's all very well in her place, but we've moved on!

If we've moved on from scripture, we've moved on from Jesus. The language used around us may still press lots of nice buttons - there is much talk of love, of God, of openness, of transformation - but unless it is focussed on the Christ of the Bible in his once-and-for-all work for us, we have come adrift. 

Initiatives like the "Boundless... Whole world reading" programme are good, but there is a way to go before the trend towards a contemporary Colossian heresy is driven back in the SA by the pressure of Christ's rich Word. Let's welcome the rich relative back, big time! 

(The rich relative illustration, possibly implied in the text itself, has come to me from somewhere, and I don't now know where. If anyone can help with a possible source...? Richard Chester? John Stott?)

The Atrocities

We are reading through Genesis in the mornings. A few days ago we arrived at the account of the rape and mass murder in Shechem, in chaps 33 and 34. I wondered aloud how many people ever preached on it - and then remembered that I had. I dug up the notes, and here they are, rewritten in places, but substantially as preached in Haywards Heath on 25.1.93. Some of it seems resonant today. And if it seems packed with material and LONG - I guess it was! And pleased be warned: these themes are genuinely shocking and unpleasant,  and may be very disturbing to some.  

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  * 

Genesis 33:12 - 34:31

1     The Bible deals with atrocities

The Bible speaks into the real world - not a cosseted, comfortable, cotton-wool protected world. This is not fairy tale stuff - or at least not the stuff of sanitised, Ladybird book fairy tales. 

At the time these horrible events took place, Dinah was somewhere between 7 and teens in age. A young girl - perhaps only 12 years old or less. 

That, tragically, is the real world. A 12 year old was raped on Thursday night in Stockport. Young teenagers have been among those raped systematically in the struggles in Bosnia.

The Bible talks about things like that. It speaks into a world which may seem far from Haywards Heath, but which is real enough. 

Shechem was not a very big place - but I guess we will not be far out if we imagine around 100 bodies piled in and around its houses.

That is the real world.

This week they dug up more bodies of massacre victims in Bosnia. Over the last weeks we have heard of murders and massacres, deaths by famine or disaster all over the world.

The Bible talks about things like that.

A Bible with these bits removed is not the whole counsel of God. 

A Bible with these bits removed is not God's message to a sinful world. 

A Bible with these bits removed is a fairy tale. 

A Bible with these bits removed cuts no ice in the real world.

One reason why Christians have made and are making so little impact is that we have seen fit to censor the Bible. We have emasculated the whole counsel of God. We have left out the nasty bits. We have cut off God's message from the world we live in. We have doctored it for nice people. Ultimately we have even grown embarrassed about the idea of judgement and hell, and we have therefore weakened the message of the cross. Our task is not simply to  "Tell them of God's love" but to be real. 

Censoring the Bible does not work. Let's leave these bits in. We think too much of protecting our children - or not embarrassing ourselves. We don't think enough about preparing them to live for God in a terrible world.

2     God's people are affected by atrocities

Dinah was of Jacob's family. She was part of God's people. She was raped.

Such things happen to God's people. Such things happen to christians. We are not immune. We are not guaranteed an easy ride.

We must be careful not to give the impression that we are. "Jesus will take care of me." As a child would read it, in the straight-forward sense, that is a confusing and dangerous half truth.

We believe in God's constant care and watchfulness over us. We give thanks for every token and example of that care - and some examples are amazing. But we know that his way for us is perfect and he will not cease to care and watch over us, even if he sees fit to lead us through atrocities, persecutions or death. Hebrews 11 makes quite clear that faith can lead to... and through... death at sword point and worse. 

Yes, Jesus takes care of me - but that doesn't mean that I will not die in a road accident today. We must never give children the impression that it does mean that. 

3     God's people commit atrocities

The supreme ugliness of this passage is that it is the people of God who commit the worst crime in it. The rape of a member of Jacob's family is horrible, a vile crime, but it then becomes the prelude and excuse for what is to follow, as committed by his family. 

Dinah is raped. She is, from our perspective, just a child. The crime against her is wicked and inexcusable. But there is even worse to come. I know it is pretty horrible to speak of degrees in such things, but if comparisons can be made at all, this awful event is not even the "worst rape" in the Bible. Dinah escapes with her life, and with Shechem wanting her as his wife. In the story of Amnon and Tamar his "love" immediately turned to hatred after the event. In the sickening story of the Levite's concubine in Judges, she lost her life after a whole night of systematic gang rape and abuse. By comparison, if such can be permitted, Dinah's awful experience is less. 

What follows is the destruction of a whole community, the innocent along with the guilty. The men are slaughtered; women and children enslaved. The property - even on dead bodies - is plundered. It is one of the most sickening episodes in scripture.

Shechem was not one of the Lord's people. Levi and Simeon were. 

Sadly, this was not the last time that God's covenant people sinned against him by saying or doing atrocious things against other human beings.

From the Crusades to Northern Ireland, from Luther's antisemitism to the mutual slaughter in Rwanda (which occurred after this sermon was preached. Ed.) people who claim to believe in Jesus have said and done things which have led, directly or indirectly to slaughter.  

4     What leads to atrocities?

We can highlight two factors here, though it is by no means a full list.

a     Sinful anger and vengefulness

We can see that working itself out through the story in various ways:

i     It was unfair

The reaction was out of proportion

ii    It was treacherous

They pretended to make a treaty with the people of Shechem. They broke it.

iii   It was blasphemous

They used the sign of God's gracious covenant as a tool for treachery. They divorced the sign from its meaning. Then they used the sign to kill.

It would be like saying, "We won't join you unless you are baptised." And then drowning them in the river.

iv    It was premature 

cf. 15:16 The day would come when their descendants would be called by God to deal with the people of this land. It is not that he doesn't see crimes like this rape and plan judgement. He does - but that day was not yet.

Beware of vengeance in your heart. Beware of anger welling up and controlling you. Beware of a sinful hatred which calls itself "righteous anger."

Beware of a desire for "Justice" which actually goes beyond justice.

Beware of ever making your Christian convictions a cover for hate.

Beware of being quicker with justice than God himself. It is his to avenge. He has said he will do it. Do you not believe that Christ will come, and that all wickedness will be destroyed forever? Wait for him to act.

Stop attacking other people's wicked actions then, and look to the sin in your own thoughts, words and deeds.

b     Weak and Wandering Leadership

Jacob's immature lads, brought up in a climate of jealousy, suspicion and scheming at home were really chips off the old block. It could be argued that their actions could be laid at Jacob's door, for his persistent failings as a father and family leader.

i     Was this a wrong move?

Should Jacob ever have stopped at Shechem as he did? Probably not.

He once again deceived Esau in order to be there.

He had been called to return by the God of Bethel (31:13) and that is where God tells him to go immediately after this incident. (35:1) He is in the wrong place for too long. Like Lot before him, that spells trouble.

How many parents have ended up putting their children into situations of grave temptation because of their own lack of spiritual forethought?

ii    When he should act, there is no move at all!

When trouble starts, what happens to Jacob? He seems to be struck dumb. All the negotiation is left to his sons. Spinelessness seems to have gripped him again. 

His inaction is really wicked, for he is the only person who could have restrained his sons from their plan. He should have negotiated for justice from a position of strength through faith in his God. After all, he has had the experience of the amazing turn-around in his relationship with Esau. God could do that again.

The end result of Jacob's folly and inaction is that the family of promise are once again in peril. (v30) How many times has that happened? How many times has God bailed them out after one of their periodic lapses? This time the people of the whole country - the promised land, remember - have good reason to throw out the people the land has been promised to. Such is sin.

Notice how neither passive inaction or the white heat of vengeance actually brings justice about. Neither is consistent with God's true justice at all.

5     Atrocities are Inexcusable, but not Unforgivable

This event cast a long shadow. Even to his dying day, Jacob could not forget it, and Levi and Simeon lost out because of it. (49:5-7)

But Jacob and his family are not God's people because they deserve to be. They are his people because of his gracious love. And so the Lord comes to Jacob, and gets him back on course again. (35:1) And it is God who deals with the problem of the danger to his chosen people. He bails them out again. (35:5) And Jacob and his people respond to God's love and are renewed spiritually. (35:2-4)

We must be frank and blunt about the sins of God's people. They are tragic, and they cause a lot of trouble. Not least, they bring God and his gospel into disrepute. 

But it isn't sinlessness that makes us the people of God. It is his grace. If we are honest, who among us has not thought of and longed for vengeance at some time - perhaps as terrible a vengeance as that of Levi and Simeon?

Such thoughts and even actions are inexcusable for the believer. But they are not unforgivable. Let us then draw near to him, and receive his forgiveness again.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  

I wish I had listened better.