Extraordinary Ordinary - Part 2
June 5, 2022Today's message was given by Pastor Patrick Tanton. A video of the message is here. "God makes the ordinary extraordinary. God can make you extraordinary despite your issues." Today, Patrick talked about Nicodemus (John 2:1-21). Click here for the Conversation Starter for the week that TimberCreek Church provided.
This is a little thing, but interesting. Nicodemus came to Jesus at night (John 3:2). This struck me because often (not all) the action with players in the Old Testament happens in the morning. Click here for a list of "and he got up early in the morning" phrases. You could say "it dawned on them" 😐. Some of those had practical purpose, like getting a head start in the cool of the morning for a long journey across the desert. Others had some coniving aspect possible, such as Abraham getting up early to take Isaac to the place of sacrifice. Maybe Abraham wanted to get out of there before Sarah awoke and started asking questions. Time of day notations can be quite meaningful.
Patrick is spot on that Jews of Jesus' day would be struck by the notion that they had to be Christian to enter the kingdom. Of course, there was yet no Christianity in the sense of an organized religion at that time, but Jesus did speak of getting to the Kingdom of God only through Him. Jewish tradition based on the Torah holds that no conversion to Judaism or to any other specific religion is necessary as long as you're an ethical monotheist and behave accordingly. One could convert to Judaism, but such conversion wasn't required in order to be an ethical monotheist.
One phrase Patrick used was, "don't wait, enjoy the kingdom now." The Torah would completely agree. While the afterlife is clearly implied by the Torah (and a normative Judaism belief), the Torah is entirely focused on how to live a good and enjoyable life now, on earth. In Judaism, tradition holds that God will ask you 5 questions*** at the pearly gates. One of those is, "why did you not partake of all permitted pleasures?"
At the end, Patrick mentioned asking for forgiveness. There are two words translated as forgive in the Old Testament: salah and nasa. Salah is the easy one. It appears 45 times and means essentially what we mean by forgive or pardon. The other word, nasa, appears 513 times but only about 30 times does it mean what we think of forgiveness. The other 480 times it means to carry or lift up or bear. This gets to a key difference in understanding forgiveness between Judaism and Christianity. The latter thinks more in terms of wiping out the punishment or even acquital. Judaism does not wipe out the crime or the punishment, it demands atonement. It requires that the guilt and the related punishment be "lifted off" or "carried" away through atonement. Click here for more.
***Upon further research, I could not find that the pleasure question was one of the questions asked at the gates to heaven (despite hearing that from a reputable source). Jewish tradition certainly holds there are questions. How many, exactly, differs from 6 to a dozen or more. The "best" answer I could find noted that the "six questions at the gates of heaven" were related to a passage in Isaiah (33:6) and they cover Faith (Were your dealings honest?), Times (Did you devote time to Torah?), Strength (Did you engage in procreation?), Salvation (Did you look forward to salvation?), Wisdom (Did you reason wisely?), and Knowledge (Did you deduce one thing from another?).
Bonus
Context is key to evaluating a moral question. Or, as Prager puts it, "no act is always wrong." For example, telling a lie is not wrong if it avoids a greater wrong, like misleading a criminal in the act of committing or trying to commit a crime. This is not the same as moral relativism. Moral relativism is when you have one idea of morals and someone else as another idea of what's moral. I'm talking about universal morality where something that is immoral in one context is always immoral in that same context. This context issue comes up in the rather sad, troubling story of the rape of Dina and what her brothers do in response, Genesis 34.