daily java

Daily Java:

Jesus replied, “Your mistake is that you don’t know the Scriptures, and you don’t know the power of God.” (Mark 12:24)

In other words, you are ignorant and you are stupid and you are a teacher of the Word. No wonder your students never really learn anything.

Jesus is talking to a group of people who liked to argue insanely detailed points. They also had their talking points that were designed to trip others up. One of these was the discussion of a woman married seven times on earth; whose wife would she be in the afterworld?

It seemed that there was no answer to this conundrum. They brought it to Jesus so that everybody could see the great renegade rabbi brought low by useless philosophical discussion.

Instead Jesus turned it on them and asked his question: haven’t you ever read about this in the writings of Moses? Of course, they had read. They were doctors of religion. But yet, they were so blinded by their desire to see things a certain way that they were blind to anything good. And Jesus made them look stupid as a result.

Ignorance of the Scriptures can be excused if you know the power of God. There were times in history that people could not read as a general rule, yet the church still thrived and people were able to lead. The Middle Ages, for instance, was a time when in general, people were illiterate. Yet the church continued because God would give them what they needed.

There were also people who were schooled in the scriptures but had no real idea how to apply it to their lives. To them, the things of God were purely academic.

With the people Jesus was talking to, it was a matter of both. They had read what they wanted to read, that which proved their positions and they had read it in a way that presupposed an answer. And then on top of it all, they refused to pay attention to what they had read. They had already made up their minds and that was all there was to that.

When your mind is made up, it doesn’t matter what anyone else says, you won’t believe it. The denomination from which I came and that I was in for so long was like that. There were certain doctrines they held as sacred in spite of the fact that they were just about the only people in the world to interpret those scriptures that way.

Somebody years past had decided that a scripture meant a certain thing and for over 100 years the denomination held that to be inviolable. They even went so far as to get certain Greek texts and Greek interpretations that agreed with them and hold them up as authoritative. Anything that disagreed was considered suspect and dishonest. Scholars who disagreed were dishonest. Anyone who disagreed was heretic.

When we read, we read to find out what God says, not to tell God what he says. And when he tells us what he says, we accept it, whether or not we want it to say that. We have to read with our minds not made up, with no preconceptions.

That is a hard thing to do. All of us view things through our own personal filters. We cannot help it. But, on the other hand, it is what Jesus wants.