Jan 13, 2022
GENESIS 24:
In
Genesis 22, Isaac asked,
22:7b GNT “I see that you have the coals and the wood, but where is the lamb for the sacrifice?”
8 Abraham answered, “God himself
will provide one.”
It is amazing to me that Moses adds
the proverb,
14 “even today people say, “On the
Lord's mountain he provides.”
In our time, we easily see how this points to the provision of the Lamb of God on the mountain called Calvary.
JOB 13:
As
we saw in Job chapter 12, by now he is pretty ticked off, starting
off with,
Job 12:1-2 GNT “Yes, you are the
voice of the people.
When
you die, wisdom will die with you.
Note the irony Job points out:
4 Even my friends laugh at me
now;
they laugh, although
I am righteous and blameless;
but there was a time when God answered my
prayers.
5 You have no
troubles, and yet you make fun of me;
you hit someone who is about to
fall.
6 But thieves and
godless people live in peace,
though their only god is their own
strength.
MARK 8b:
In
yesterday's reading in the first half of Mark chapter 8, Jesus fed
the 4,000, and then the Pharisees demanded a miraculous sign
‘showing God’s approval’— literally a sign ‘from heaven’. The
reading yesterday ended with the disciples not understanding what
Jesus meant by
Mark. 8:15 GNT “Take care and be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees and the yeast of Herod.”
In many passages of Mark and the other Gospels, there are places where Jesus talks of ‘the Son Man’. And He is talking about himself, but using the pronoun ‘he’ for the Son of Man. Here is an example from verse 31:
8:31 GNT Then Jesus began to
teach his disciples: “The Son of Man must suffer much and be
rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the teachers of the
Law. He will be put to death, but three days later he will rise to
life.”
This form of speech— speaking of oneself in the third person, is quite unusual in any language. For modern readers, the term ‘son of man’ is also very strange sounding. The standard meaning for the Hebrew idiom ‘son of man’ was ‘ordinary flesh and blood human being’. Jesus was both concealing his identity to some, and revealing it to those who were able to remember the prophecy about a special Son of Man in Daniel 7.