Tag: Digging in Deeper

Digging in Deeper: Romans 5:1-5

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“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We have also obtained access through him by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope. This hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What is the worth of hope? That’s a trickier question to answer than it might appear at first glance. As a follower of Jesus, I would argue that hope gives our lives purpose and meaning and even direction. Hope gives us something to live toward. It brings the promise of a future that will be better than the present. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be hope at all; it would be dread. Yet this understanding of the nature – and more, the worthwhileness – of hope requires a certain view of the world to make sense. Absent that view, hope can seem like little more than foolish wishful thinking that will only serve to distract a person from what is really real, or of doing the hard work necessary to make our future plans a reality on our own. Hope, you see, requires us to surrender ourselves to someone higher and more powerful than we are; someone who knows and controls the future in a way we cannot. At a little more than four episodes in, this grimmer view of hope lies at the heart of the second prequel series to the hit series, Yellowstone, and the follow-up to the immensely popular first prequel series, 1883, called 1923. Today, let’s talk about how the series has been at the halfway mark, and why its worldview isn’t one worth adopting for ourselves.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 7:14-17

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“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Pharaoh’s heart is hard: He refuses to let the people go. Go to Pharaoh in the morning. When you see him walking out to the water, stand ready to meet him by the bank of the Nile. Take in your hand the staff that turned into a snake. Tell him: The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to tell you: Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness. But so far you have not listened. This is what the Lord says: Here is how you will know that I am the Lord. Watch. I am about to strike the water in the Nile with the staff in my hand, and it will turn to blood.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

At last we come to the place the action really gets going. Moses and Aaron finally go to confront Pharaoh directly about his refusal to let the people of Israel go. This begins a series of actions God uses to convince him to do it. Exactly how these played out is something that has puzzled scholars and interpreters for centuries, but especially in the modern world. We’ll take some time working through each of these, starting here where all the waters in Egypt…except for some of them…were turned to blood. How did this work? Let’s talk about it.

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Digging in Deeper: Exodus 6:2-5

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“Then God spoke to Moses, telling him, ‘I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty, but I was not known to them by my name ‘the Lord.’ I also established my covenant with them to give them the land of Canaan, the land they lived in as aliens. Furthermore, I have heard the groaning of the Israelites, whom the Egyptians are forcing to work as slaves, and I have remembered my covenant.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When a school gets an educational path right, everything you learn builds on what came before it. I’ve talked before about a very specific experience of that I had when I was getting my chemistry degree. My senior-level chem professor sat us down on the first day of class and said we were going to spend the semester learning why everything we had learned before wasn’t correct. He was being mostly tongue-in-cheek. What he meant was that we were going to spend the semester building on the foundation of what we had learned before in ways that made it hard to recognize some of what we had originally been taught. This is something God does throughout the Scriptures and especially here in the story of the Exodus. Let’s pause on this little section to see how He is doing this here.

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Digging in Deeper: Ephesians 2:8-9

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“For you are saved by grace through faith, and this is not from yourselves; it is God’s gift – not from works, so that no one can boast.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Okay, I know I’ve talked about it several times – more than any other series I’ve reviewed since I’ve been doing this – but I just can’t help it. It was so good, and now it’s over. Rarely has a show received the amount of cultural acclaim that Ted Lasso has achieved. People are begging its creator, Jason Sudeikis, to bring it back for another story arc. And they are doing this not simply because it was so very good, but because of the good it introduced to the culture over its three-season run. And yet this past Wednesday, the series officially came to an end. And as much as it pains me to say this, I hope that ending remains. Let’s talk one more time about why the show was so good, and why it could have been even better.

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Digging in Deeper: Exodus 4:10-12

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“But Moses replied to the Lord, ‘Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent – either in the past or recently or since you have been speaking to your servant – because my mouth and my tongue are sluggish.’ The Lord said to him, ‘Who placed a mouth on humans? Who makes a person mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go! I will help you speak and I will teach you what to say.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I hate excuses. Hearing someone else refuse to take responsibility for something they have said or done, but instead offer up a list of reasons why it is everybody else’s fault makes me want to drive my head through a wall (or better yet, their head). I hate excuses. Unless, of course, I am the one making them. Then they aren’t excuses at all. They’re explanations for why things turned out the way they did that are entirely reasonable. When God answered Moses’ hopefully disqualifying question of what would make the people believe he really came from God so convincingly, he switched from objections to excuses. Let’s take a look at what he said and how God responded.

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