Another Scriptural Assignment

SAT., JAN. 18, 1992, 7:25 AM
FARM, STUDY

Since you carried out the assignment to read and study the Scriptures which told of King David’s chosen life I shall offer you the next logical one. The Book of Acts of the Apostles tells a good deal about the life and ministry of Paul, so this is My next suggestion as a focus for study.

Though some of what Paul writes seems personal to his spiritual path, as it diverges from yours, you still acknowledge that his epistles have been important to your born-again experience. Let’s consider some of the mystical nature of Scripture that I have recommended earlier.

Paul was a Jew, one educated as a Pharisee. Your feelings about Jews is ambivalent. Theirs is an exclusive heritage, and you are not part of it. There is an element of competition, for I, as Almighty God, did choose the Jews and favored them mightily. Their faithfulness to Me was very spotty for many years… and then I came, as Jesus, a Jewish child and then a man, and the Pharisees and other Jewish leaders rejected Me, even got me crucified. And Paul was one of these… one of the most zealous.

I turned his life around, and he became My most active and effective apostle, and yet he remained a Jew and a Pharisee, and therefore not attractive to you. You prefer the life of freedom under My Messianic grace to the rules, proclamations, commandments, and taboos of the Jews. Here, in this way, you are much like Paul was: he knew the Jewish life, but he also knew of grace, and he could never quite give up the former for full acceptance of the latter. He knew, clearly, that he had been chosen, out of his pharisaical life to be the one to tell the world about the grace that came from My sacrifice. He struggled with the contrast. You have had no such struggle.

Your early Christian experiences were not in a church or a tradition that focused on sin and living the Christian life in an objective, obvious sin-free fashion. Thus you did not have to reject and yet hang onto another view of My requirements, as Paul did. And isn’t it interesting that many of the rules, admonitions, and “sins” which some Christians, of a self-proclaimed “fundamentalist” stripe, seek to follow or avoid come from Paul’s letters.

Paul never married, and apparently, from the Scriptures, never was attracted to women, or a woman. He didn’t have a family, with its joys, its responsibilities, and its sorrows. Thus, your wish, a legitimate one, that some scripture had been written by a family man… even a family woman. Paul wrote that in Christ there was no Jew nor Greek, no male nor female. This was My message for him to offer. And yet, Scripture, in its authorship does not reflect this sense of equality. You are a “liberal” Christian, who accepts that I give spiritual power and messages… and chosenness… to women as well as to men. In this you differ from Paul.

After his active life of ministry began Paul had no home. Symbolically he was a tent maker. He stayed in some places to minister and to found churches, but he was always dependent upon the generosity of others. Your life has been lived in 4 locales, but this one, in which you are now, is the most persistent and stable. You even have tenure in your job, and you feel as though this place is yours, even as the size of the mortgage denies this. Your basic life style is thus different from Paul’s.