Contemplative Bible Reading

Jonah 1:15-16 (New Living Translation)

15 Then the sailors picked Jonah up and threw him into the raging sea, and the storm stopped at once! 16 The sailors were awestruck by the Lord’s great power, and they offered him a sacrifice and vowed to serve him.

Jonah, allowing the Lord to work through him, was one of the great evangelists of all time. All alone (physically), he converted one of the greatest cities in the history of mankind.

Before that, we see above that Jonah leads a bunch of sailors to the Lord. Admitting he was wrong and the cause of a great storm, Jonah convinces the sailors to toss him into the raging sea. The sailors, with a strong sense of right and wrong, do so.

God stopped the storm.

The sailors were awestruck. They immediately sacrificed to God and changed their lives. What was Jonah’s sermon? Uh, well, we don’t seem to have one. Simply, “Toss me into the sea.”

1 John 3:11-13 (New Living Translation)

11 This is the message you have heard from the beginning: We should love one another. 12 We must not be like Cain, who belonged to the evil one and killed his brother. And why did he kill him? Because Cain had been doing what was evil, and his brother had been doing what was righteous. 13 So don’t be surprised, dear brothers and sisters, if the world hates you.

Let’s start at the end—as Christians, we shouldn’t be surprised when those outside of Christ hate us. It has been this way since the beginning, the hatred of the unrighteous towards the righteous.

Recall Cain and Abel. (Back up a step in the above verses.) Abel had been righteous; Cain had not. Cain’s hatred of the righteous brother led him to murder.

In America today, we are fortunate—the vast majority of us are. The unrighteous don’t murder the righteous (again, the vast majority).

Hate? Do the unrighteous still hate the righteous? We don’t like to use the word “hate” when it comes to religious belief in America, but…

Back up one last time in the above verses: we should love one another. Simply said, easily said, but easily done? Please God, help me in my unbelief.

Jeremiah 6:15 (New Living Translation)

Are they ashamed of their disgusting actions?
Not at all—they don’t even know how to blush!

blush: verb, develop a pink tinge in the face from embarrassment or shame.

The prophet is relaying the words of God to the people. The people have been performing disgusting acts. Their reaction? Nothing. No shame, no embarrassment, nothing.

There are various passages in the Bible that speak of hearts that have been seared, burned so much that the flesh has become hard and brittle. This inability to be embarrassed reminds me of the seared hearts.

There are days when life is difficult. There are seasons when it is overwhelming. People do just about anything to survive. Long seasons of the survival lifestyle dull our memory of right, wrong, and shame.

Then there are times when life is good, but I am disgusting. Please God, please have me never lose the ability to blush in shame.

1 Peter 2:11 (American Standard Version)

Beloved, I beseech you as sojourners and pilgrims, to abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul;

It is easy to focus on the second part of the above verse—abstain from those things that are tugging at us from the flesh. Some of those things war against our souls, i.e., they hurt us. They may be fun—eating ice cream for breakfast everyday is fun—but they hurt us.

Consider the first part of the verse: we are pilgrims on a journey that is taking us through this current life and situation. The writer tells us to continue our journey as pilgrims. Keep going, don’t stop for long and tarry. There are things about us that may tug at us and cause us to pause too long.

My life is blessed. It is pretty good, folks. I like it here. Some days I like it here a bit too much.

I am a pilgrim, not a resident. Continue on the journey. Please God, help my feet to keep moving.

Jeremiah 9:15-16 (New Living Translation)

15 So now, this is what the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, the God of Israel, says: Look! I will feed them with bitterness and give them poison to drink. 16 I will scatter them around the world, in places they and their ancestors never heard of, and even there I will chase them with the sword until I have destroyed them completely.”

God is speaking to His people through the prophet Jeremiah. They have continued to disobey, and punishment is coming.

They will be scattered to places whose names they don’t even know. “Where are we?” will be the cry of despair. Can it become worse than that?

Back in the 2000s, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Louisiana. Persons were rushed onto airplanes and flown to evacuation centers scattered about the country. Upon landing, many of the evacuated persons asked, “Where are we?” When told, many—who didn’t have much knowledge of US geography—asked, “Where is that?”

Ignorance, not knowing, is frightening. Not knowing where I am is terrifying. The more frightening aspect of not knowing where I am is not know how to return home. Home is the place of comfort and safety. I don’t know how or if I will ever be safe gain.

Truly a dreaded punishment. Let us obey the advice of the Creator. God does know what is best for me.

Proverbs 20:17 (New Living Translation)

Stolen bread tastes sweet,
but it turns to gravel in the mouth.

A generation or two ago, a counter culture hero in America wrote a book about how to steal everything needed to get by. There was some quote about how stolen food tastes better.

Well, every culture, every generation or two, has such counter culture heroes who teach shortcuts to life and such. Read, however, the above Proverb. It all eventually turns to a mouthful of gravel.

And if you have never fallen unexpectedly and had a mouthful of gravel, try it, or don’t try it and take my word for it…it is pretty bad. The taste, texture, and odor are quite…distasteful.

Hosea 4:1-3 (New Living Translation)

1 Hear the word of the Lord, O people of Israel!
The Lord has brought charges against you, saying:
“There is no faithfulness, no kindness,
no knowledge of God in your land.
2 You make vows and break them;
you kill and steal and commit adultery.
There is violence everywhere—
one murder after another.
3 That is why your land is in mourning,
and everyone is wasting away.
Even the wild animals, the birds of the sky,
and the fish of the sea are disappearing.

Verse 3, the land mourns, everyone wastes, even the animals, birds, and fish disappear. Why this environmental disaster?

The people have disobeyed God.

Wait, not a good answer. Surely there is more here, more science, more technology, more abuse of these inventions.

Well, let’s read.

Lying is in there. That’s right. The politicians, the business people, those rich folks are lying to us about what they are doing. They are hiding the damage they do.

And those powerful people kill and steal. That’s right! They do those things and the rest of us suffer.

Wait, how did this “commit adultery” get in the list? What we do in the bedroom doesn’t affect the environment, does it? And how did that “no knowledge of God” get in there as well? I mean, what, read the Bible and the environment will be fine?

There is much here that doesn’t make sense. There is much here that we don’t want to read. We need some editing. We need God to listen to us instead of us listening to God, right?

Sorry. God is God; I am not. That is a good thing—for all of us and the environment as well.

Proverbs 11:24-25 (New Living Translation)

24 Give freely and become more wealthy;
be stingy and lose everything.

25 The generous will prosper;
those who refresh others will themselves be refreshed.

We live in the sharing economy. Wikipedia is the world’s source of all knowledge. It costs nothing. It was and is being written by volunteers who write it for the love of sharing knowledge. Isn’t this new idea wonderful?

Well, maybe the sharing economy isn’t such a new idea. Hence, these Proverbs. The writer shows the difference between freely giving what God has given and holding it tightly in my clenched fist.

Giving blesses the receiver. Giving blesses the giver. God blesses the giver, receiver, and the gift.

This isn’t new. This isn’t complicated. All I have to do is ease the muscles that clench my fist. Why is easing so difficult?

Habakkuk 2:15 (New Living Translation)

What sorrow awaits you who make your neighbors drunk!
You force your cup on them
so you can gloat over their shameful nakedness.

“Let’s get them drunk so they will embarrass themselves, and then we will have a good time!” So says the prophet speaking the words of God to His people.

Sound familiar? Where have we heard that before? Oh yeah, in high school, and just about everyday and everywhere since. Give them something intoxicating, something that causes them to lose sight of good sense and…

Me? Oh, there is no such thing that will go to my head and cause me to uh, er, well maybe there are a few things, but, you know, well, …

No. This is the same for all of us, and especially me. Pump me with the wrong right stuff and I lose sense of all that is the right focus of my senses, and the result is the last part of the above verse.

Please God, help me in my unbelief. Help me to avoid the tempatations of intoxication and intoxicating others.

Proverbs 11:19 (New Living Translation)

Godly people find life;
evil people find death.

Life and death. In the final reckoning, what else is there? This chapter runs through a number of ways to say this, but this is the summary. Do what God wants us to do, and good will come back to us. Ignore God’s advice, and after a while, suffering comes.

Note that there is no promise of an easy life. (“Easy” is subjective, and since I am the subject, I decide what that is. Silly me.) Simply life. Simply the greatest blessing the God gives.

What do I want? Am I humble enough to follow God’s advice instead of finding my own clever shortcuts through some desire to “make my own mistakes?”

My own life is pretty good. I won’t burn words listing my blessings. I can puff up and say that it is my just reward for following God, but that would be merely silly puffing. God blesses in ways that God sees fit, and God knows what fits each one of us.

Attempt to be Godly each moment. Enough written. Now let’s pray for such.