UNBLOCKING THE WELL OF THE LIVING WORD

DAY 8 MORNING Read John 10:1-18  

1,2 SAMUEL: JESUS IS THE  SHEPHERD KING… A KING AFTER GOD’S OWN HEART

1 and 2 Samuel introduce David who was not the king that God would use to bless the world. He was a forerunner of the King of Kings the ruler and saviour of mankind. Jesus would be the fulfilment of that eternal covenant that the Lord made with David, who will sit on the throne of David forever. The song of Hannah is her response to the Lord answering her desperate prayers for a child, and is mirrored by David’s song of deliverance at the end of 2 Samuel 22. God will thunder in heaven against his enemies. There is no rock like the Lord. Hannah’s prayer was not just answered by the birth of her son Samuel and him being raised up as a prophet to Israel. Hannah’s son prepared the way for a king after God’s own heart, a humble king who would vindicate the righteous and destroy the evil ones. David was a king who trusted God and obeyed him. He foreshadowed the coming of Jesus. God’s presence was with David wherever he went[1]. Although David desired to build a temple for God, this was not what God wanted. The Lord says to David, “I will make for you a great nation,” and this was one of the promises to Abraham in Genesis 12:2, which would now be fulfilled through David. God would build David a house, a dynasty that David’s son would continue and succeed him as King. Goliath is felled with a stone and the Philistines are repeatedly pushed back. God’s presence in the ark of the covenant is valued by David. For those who despised God there was no place for God’s presence to rest. Godly character is necessary and the honouring of God as king was of supreme importance to house the presence of the living God. David’s trust and obedience to God faltered and when he should have gone to war, he saw Bathsheba bathing and had sex with her and went on to arrange for her husband to be killed. The Bible honestly relates David’s failings, and the punishment that God meted out on David and Israel as a result, although Israel was blessed under David’s kingship and God made an everlasting covenant with David. When 1,2 Samuel are read through the lens of the New Testament, Jesus  is revealed as the true shepherd king, a king after God’s own heart.

MISSIONARY MONKS: PATRICK 389-461[2]

Patrick was ethnically British and a citizen of the Roman Empire, born into a family of the local nobility and he was raised a Christian. When he was 16, he was captured by a band of Irish raiders and was enslaved. After being a slave for six years he received a vision directing him and he escaped and was successfully reunited with his family. He received new visions directing him back to Ireland and he became a monk bishop characterised by a call and commitment to the people who had enslaved him. He was “probably the earliest Christian leader or missionary to take seriously the task of completing the Lord’s great commission.”[3] He wrote of being “predestined to preach the gospel even to the ends of the Earth”[4]. His life was focused on prayer, service and hardship and encouraging others to monastic living. His legacy was an evangelized Ireland with “a network of missionary monasteries where students were learning Latin, studying the Scriptures and working among the local population.”[5]

CLICK ON BOLD and you will be directed to Joshua Project website with more information for prayer.

PRAY for “The South Asian, general in United Kingdom the largest unreached people group in Europe  whose language is Hindi and whose primary religion Hinduism. There are 3,062,00 and they are 3% Christian  and 1.5% evangelical.” [6] Since the Second World War many South Asians began to come to Britain in greater numbers and many more Asians in the early 1970s from Uganda. We now face a huge mission field of South Asians here on our doorstep. Lord, you gave Patrick a vision and he saw the whole of Ireland evangelized in just a few years. Inspire us afresh that the fields are white unto harvest, today!

DAY 8 EVENING Read Psalm 36-40. Re-read Psalm 40

PSALM 40:  JESUS CHRIST: “MY EARS YOU HAVE PIERCED”

Psalm 40:6-8  “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire but my ears you have pierced, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require. Then I said, “Here I am, I have come- it is written about me in the scroll. I desire to do your will, O| my God; your law is within my heart” [7] “Augustine saw Christ speaking through the psalms. He had no trouble seeing how Scripture could be interpreted figurally or allegorically as he was a Platonist …because he thought actual things are copies of the transcendent. But what was missing in Augustine’s thinking was how this happens in history…he needed to see that we can read the bible figurally only because at a certain point in time, salvation was accomplished on the cross. The cross is a sign of salvation but not merely a sign. It is a non-negotiable nonfigurative description of the very mechanism of salvation.” Christ redeems us on the cross; this is what Augustine learned from Paul’s epistle to the Galatians. Salvation is not something abstract and eternal that is figurally pictured in the cross but something that actually occurred on the cross. When Augustine read the psalms in the light of these insights of Paul about Christ’s crucified human humility, Scripture opened up to him. One way this happened was that he now saw Christ using the Psalms to explain himself.

[8]“The earliest Christians were convinced that “a few special humans in the past had in fact obtained an otherworldly glimpse into divine affairs- the ancient Hebrew prophets.” These prophets such as David and Isaiah were enabled to overhear conversations between God the Father and God the Son. The prophets took on the prosopa of the members of the Trinity and spoke in character in the writings. Bates begins his book on the importance of prosopological exegesis for the development of the doctrine of the Trinity[9], by pointing to the way the author of Hebrews identifies the speaker in Psalm 40:6-8 as Christ himself.”[10]“Consequently when Christ came into the world he said: ‘Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired but a body you have prepared for me; in burnt offerings and sin offerings you have taken no pleasure. David neither abolished the sacrificial system nor sanctified us through the offering of his body. The Messiah did these things. The words of Psalm 40 make perfect sense when we read them as the words of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, which is exactly what the author of Hebrews does. But how can Jesus Christ be speaking in Psalm 40, a millennium prior to the incarnation of God in the birth of Jesus? This is the question answered by prosopological exegesis,”

This prosopological exegesis is the kind of  interpretation that we described Augustine doing with Psalm 31 yesterday. Hebrews 10 verse 5, says “a body you have prepared for me.” Psalm 40:6 says “my ears you have pierced”, but otherwise the passages, are virtually identical. What is happening here?  In the contemporary culture a slave after he had worked as a slave for six years, could be released… but he would have been unable to take his wife and children with him, if he had left. So, alternatively that slave could choose to be a love slave and serve as a slave for the rest of his life. If he chose to be a love slave, his ear would be pierced by an awl, when standing against a door post.

Jesus was saying when he died on the cross that he was choosing to be a love slave, his ears were pierced, his body had been prepared. That is what was happening as he died on the cross as a love slave, redeeming us all. So here is another example of Jesus Christ speaking prophetically through a psalm, before his incarnation, death and resurrection. Salvation is not an abstract doctrine, but an actual event that was revealed prophetically 1000 years beforehand.

PRAYER Lord you chose to be a love slave, your ears were pierced, your body prepared, you died for me.

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[1] 2 Samuel 7:9

[2] Drawn from Smither, E.L.  Missionary monks, Cascade books, 2016, 51-63.

[3]  Cited in Robert Christian Mission, 150.quoted in Smither, E.L.  Missionary monks, Cascade books, 2016.

[4] Patrick Coroticus, 6 cited in  O’Loughlin, St Patrick and  quoted in Smither, E.L.  Missionary monks, Cascade books, 2016.

[5]  Smither, E.L.  Missionary monks, Cascade books, 2016, 63.

[6]  Data provided by Joshua Project https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/19211/UK

[7] Paragraph is summary of Carter, C.A. Interpreting Scripture, Baker Academic, 2018 173.

[8] Carter, C.A. Interpreting Scripture, Baker Academic, 2018, 192.

[9] Bates, M. Birth of the Trinity, quoted in  Carter, C.A. Interpreting Scripture, Baker Academic, 2018, 193.

[10] Carter, C.A. Interpreting Scripture and the Great Tradition, Baker Academic, 2018, 193.