The Daily Devo with Steve

I love doing these multi-chapter read throughs, where I put on my Bible App so it can read to me while I follow along in my physical Bible - there is something about the tactile nature of the Bible in my hand, where I can see it and touch it, along with the listening, that really engages me.  And reading quickly like this, in multiple chapters, draws out different things because I am not pausing to read into things as much - and there is a benefit to mixing it up between the deeper reading and the more surface level reading like this.

Today though, in reading chapters 1-7, I noticed how the messages that the disciples were preaching and teaching were basically had one theme - here is what we saw and heard is what we heard.  I don’t see them teaching the stories of the Old Testament, and The Law; I don’t see them trying to convince people to behave to receive their salvation.  The message was simply about an event that took place...that Jesus was hung on a cross, died, and then rose from the grave; then, these guys spoke with him and dined with him and saw him depart the earth and rise into heaven.  That’s the whole message.  It just reminds me that I think we make our faith and our message more complicated that it needs to be far too often.  And, I think we (as ‘the church’) can end up being very unclear about we it means to be a Christian.  Really, the answer to that question is just what the disciples said...being a Christian is believing that Jesus was hung on a cross, died, and then rose from the grave; then he appears to a whole bunch of people and interacted with those people before he ended up going back up into heaven.  And, the reason for all of this is because sin requires punishment - and since we have proven, since the start of the world, that we can’t really act right, we keep sinning, God decided to send Jesus to live the life we couldn’t, and die a death that was really meant for us.  All of that was so we can have our sin justified, which is just a fancy word for ‘accounted for’...by placing our faith in Jesus, we can have our relationship with God restored.  Just like we have to get right with each other before our relationships between ourselves can be made whole again.  That is what we believe.  And, likewise, it is that information that would have to be proven to be invalid in order to shake our faith.  Whether Jonah and Whale, or Noah and the Ark, or any of these other stories are all 100% factually true is a secondary issue.  I am not saying anything about what I do or don’t believe personally, all I am saying is that our faith hinges on the resurrection, so if someone wants to give you a hard time about ‘the Bible’, you should direct that conversation to the resurrection...and if you do that more than once or twice, it is interesting how confident you’ll feel about your faith.  There is no good evidence from science, or history, or anywhere to hurt that position...which is interesting.

Lastly, turning to Stephen, instead of having a message of what he’d seen and heard, Stephen gives more of a reasoned approach, going through a wonderful articulation of the God’s historic relationship with His people, a history of Israel.  His message is more akin to modern apologetics...where he shows that history really points towards, not randomness; that there is a God bringing order and purpose from what, in the moment, often feels like chaos.  I just love reading this passage from him from chapters 6 and 7.

Today, I am reminded to keep it simple...and to make sure my faith is rooted on THE thing, the resurrection story, rather than to letting myself be drawn into a position of trying to defend the Bible as a whole.

This morning, I am finishing up my 2nd day of reading in preparation for studying through Acts.  This study will continue with a read through where I will do about a third each day over three days, and then I will dive into the text in more of a chapter-by-chapter pattern, unless I find an idea that makes me want to break it into smaller pieces here and there.

Yesterday I noted that Acts outlines the spread of the early Christian church that took place without a Bible...meaning, churches and teaching about Jesus were flourishing and spreading throughout the entire world without any “Bible” to use as a teaching tool.  Think about that, what was ‘church’ like for them?  It is refreshing to think how raw and fresh our faith could be, how it was for them...it wasn’t about memorizing scripture and becoming a Bible scholar; it was about learning to invite the Holy Spirit into your life.

That being said, what really jumped out at me this morning goes back to something I thought about during the Daniel story, this idea that God really was setting the world up for Jesus’ ministry to come, even when we couldn’t see it.

I am going to be paying attention to all of the times where God uses chaos to create opportunity.  I will be looking for all of the times when chaos is actually the stage upon which God creates change, creates impact, and brings purpose to people’s lives.  It is a reminder to me that in the moments when I am struggling, when I feel like things are maybe spiraling a bit out of control, those are the very moments to cling to God the most, because those moments are often the birthplace of God’s greatest moments of impact.

Tomorrow, I will dive into Acts...today though, I found that to be a really encouraging reminder!

I am going to be reading Acts next.  It may not be chapter by chapter this time though, I am going to pause and spend time chasing things down a rabbit hole if/as they come, and I am going to pause on ideas that speak to me.  As always, I am going to take a day to read some introduction material (today), and then I will do a read-through over the course of probably 2 days in this case, since it is a longer book.

As I was reading these introductions to Acts, I couldn’t help but dwell on as I read these comments from a couple of different introductions this morning:

First of all - at this point, Jesus has died on the cross and has been raised to life, appeared to hundreds of people, and then ascended into Heaven.  These are all extraordinary events, and would no doubt have created a lot of hoopla and stirred up quite a lot of conversation and rumors among people.  The best arguments as to the dating of when this book was actually written get it to about 62 AD (the latest is only about 8 years later at 70 AD).  So, let’s assume the 62 date for a moment; and, we’ll go with the most widely accepted date for Jesus’ death, which is 33 AD.  Now, we are only 29 years later in time.  Here is why I am pointing this point...one of the most common, and weak, criticisms of the Bible, which is given by people who are actually the least informed, because a well-informed reader wouldn’t make this argument...but I digress...is this argument, “Well, these events were all written so long after Jesus died that these stories had time to get embellished and to become almost mythological in nature before they were ever recorded”...something along those lines.  Well, think about this for a moment...29 years from now, will you remember some of what you’ve been doing and experiencing in the midst of this COVID-19?  Will there be certain things that are etched into your memory, never to go away?  Further, imagine that you lived in a culture where there was no reading, and no writing, and stories relied on telling and re-telling in order to be passed along...won’t it be true that you’ll never forget about this?  Don’t you remember 9/11?  Did the planes hit buildings in Seattle, Washington?  No, you remember that they hit the Twin Towers in NYC.  Likewise, the MOST important thing about Jesus’ life that we hold to as Christians is that Jesus rose from the grave, on the 3rd day, and was seen by hundreds of people before He eventually ascended into Heaven.  Now, how likely is it that people ‘mis-saw’ an event like this?  Wouldn’t that be at least as impressive as September 11th?  Come on, 29 years later, people didn’t have any trouble remembering seeing a dead dude walking around again...it is already just about 20 years since Sept 11 happened, and I can still remember where I was standing, what I was doing, where I was going, and what I was thinking when I heard the news.

The second thing, which I was only mention here, and then we’ll circle back to it is this...as we read, notice how the church was flourishing and spreading WITHOUT the existence of ‘the Bible’.  The reason I point this out, as actually mentioned during my last reading in Daniel, is because so many people place their faith on ‘the Bible’, and it’s infallibility, and it’s historical accuracy.  We’ll talk about this I am sure, but don’t let that be you...your faith doesn’t depend on ‘the Bible’...it depends on the events of the resurrection.  And, fortunately, there is just very weak evidence (and not really any) that argues well that they are false...that’s where our faith should really reside.

For today, I am just leaving with this renewed sense of faith...I am so thankful that our God thought to provide a way for us to know what happened, and to remind us of whose we are...we are His children.

These 2 chapters really go together, so I am not going to break them into 2 different readings.  Now, at the onset, I am going to go ahead and say that this is a very controversial chapter.  Scholars have wrestled with this material for a while now, trying to figure out the dates and events and timelines.  Most Christians are taught that the Bible is ‘the infallible Word of God’, and that there can’t be any mistakes in it.  I don’t want to trample on that idea, so we can only really say that this chapter has challenged scholars in that they haven’t been able to put the timelines and events into place yet.  That being said, it seems that time has tended to synchronize the seeming randomness and our understanding, so it wouldn’t shock me if this occurred one day as it related to this text as well.

A word on that infallibility principle - I think it is important, as followers of Jesus, that our faith doesn’t hinge on the infallibility of the Bible.  The Bible isn’t really even necessary for our faith...it is a helpful resource, and it is certainly a God-given resource, but the church as we know it, the followers of Jesus, were well-established and flourishing long before the Bible was ever assembled as a book.  It is the events of the resurrection on which our faith should hinge, and the Bible should be viewed as a prop, not the main element of faith.  I think that is lost in many cases today, and we end up concerned with defending the Bible rather than exploring it, living it, and using it as a way to experience God.

At any rate, I digress...back to today’s reading, the conclusion of Daniel.  Instead of plowing deep into these events and timelines (which you will notice I have mostly avoided already), I want to point out the dates at the end of the chapter.  I don’t really know what Daniel is specifically getting at with these numbers of days, but I can say this...there is a pattern of long-term timelines all throughout his writings.  As I was reading this, the thought that coming to mind is just how long God’s timeline is compared to mine.  It is so hard to maintain the perspective of eternity in my daily life.  For me, the older I get, the shorter life seems to get, and the more I tend to appreciate these longer stretches of time God sees our lives through, but I still can’t fathom God’s work spanning over thousands of years.  It is a time horizon for which I have no real frame of reference.  I am reminded once more, as Daniel has done repeatedly, that I have to live my life with my wagon hitched to God’s, otherwise, there is just no way to create meaning in my life.  I have heard it called ‘significant insignificance’, this idea that our only hope for finding hope, is placing our hope in the One who is orchestrating eternity.

So, to close our time in Daniel, the big themes I am taking away from these readings are the ideas that faithfulness in the small things adds up, and that through continued faithfulness we will experience greater levels of understanding as to what God is doing in the world around us, and we’ll experience a stronger relationship with Him.  I also have come to appreciate on a higher level that God really is in the driver’s seat; that He has a plan that spans generations, and that He is going to work that plan out with or without me, and my best life, my greatest fulfillment, will come in partnering with Him.  In that partnering, I can have the most significant life possible, all while realizing that I am just incapable of truly understand how big and how great our God is.

As I sometimes do, I am pausing on my reading of Daniel to just change the pace a little, from heavy vision-reading and to dig into a little of the timeless wisdom of Proverbs.  Today I chose Proverbs 24, and what really jumped out at me this morning were verses 17 and 18:

17 Do not rejoice when your enemy falls,

and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles,

18 lest the Lord see it and be displeased,

and turn away his anger from him.

I am reminded that God is in the ‘heart’ business.  Meaning, what I do is important, but the reason it is important is two-fold - (1) what I do directs what I feel ultimately, and (2) what I do is also typically a great cue as to what I feel.

Unpacking this a little...most of tend, by default, to allow our emotions to guide our actions.  We do something because we feel like doing it.  We say something because we feel like saying it.  A wise person understands though, that often, we have to do something in order to ‘feel it’.  Sometimes we have to ‘fake it til we make it’.  You don’t feel the love for your spouse at the moment?  Well, you aren’t excused, you still have to ACT the right way.  You don’t feel like doing the work that needs to get done...tough, you still have to do it.  And, what is such a great twist of irony is the fact that we typically start to FEEL it once we are actually doing it.  It is a great life lesson.

Here, we see a reminder related to the second of those insights, that our actions can be a great mirror for our hearts.  Do you silently celebrate when a rival fails?  Do you silently do a fist pump when a you can tell that your spouse figured out that you were actually right about something, and has to suffer a feeling of defeat?  Ouch!  In the moment when you sense someone else’s defeat, or failure, whether at your hands or not, if I feel anything other than compassion in that moment, I have a heart issue.

Today, I am reminded to pay attention to what my heart is revealing to me.  What do I feel in the little moments of my day?  Because, what I feel is really indicative of whose I am, who I am serving, and where I need some work.  My gut feelings are a mirror for my heart.

Daniel 10 is a shorter chapter than the previous few, and it also has a lot less explanation with it.  In this chapter, Daniel sees a vision for which he again sees a messenger, and angel, to help with the interpretation.  But, right as it draws to a close, we get a glimpse into what I believe is the real purpose of this chapter, we read these words:

18 Again one having the appearance of a man touched me and strengthened me. 19 And he said, “O man greatly loved, fear not, peace be with you; be strong and of good courage.” And as he spoke to me, I was strengthened and said, “Let my lord speak, for you have strengthened me.” 20 Then he said, “Do you know why I have come to you? But now I will return to fight against the prince of Persia; and when I go out, behold, the prince of Greece will come. 21 But I will tell you what is inscribed in the book of truth: there is none who contends by my side against these except Michael, your prince.”

The part of this I keyed in on is right there at the beginning, in verse 19, where Daniel is simply encouraged, and then that is tied to verse 21, when he is reminded that there is a bigger plan and purpose that is transpiring.  It reminds me in the same way this morning.  It is a reminder that even though I don’t see Him and even when I don’t necessarily ‘feel’ Him, God IS there.  We have been taught in the preceding chapters that God will show up when we pray from a place of humility, and when we have a pure heart, in the right context.  But, what happens if we don’t FEEL God’s presence?  Well, we can be reminded through these words, in more of a ‘reasoned’ way, that God is with us, because if we look back at God’s word, we can see evidence that He has always been there.  I mean, really, how can we honestly look at the scriptures and not come away with the impression that God is in control, that God is working a plan, and that He is with us?  We really can’t.

So, today, I am reminded that if the emotional side of my spiritual life feels a little empty, if I am just not feeling it that day, and if I am not feeling connected with God, then it is okay and even encouraged to reflect on God’s presence through reason...sometimes maybe I just open the Bible to the table of contents and flip through it, reminding myself of the evidence that God has given me to know that He is who He says He is...sometimes it is just good to meet my emotional need with a logical solution, and in that way I can ‘be strong and of good courage’ the angel charged Daniel.

In reading this chapter, which is really a prayer and response session between Daniel and God via Gabriel, I can’t help but appreciate the pattern Daniel uses in his prayer.

Declaration - God is great, and God is in control of His creation

Confession - We have sinned...and here are our specific confessions

Request - Following an honest confession, you can’t help but be completely humble in your requests, because you’ve just declared how undeserving you are of grace, and that’s the perfect state from which to make requests

This is the same pattern we see in The Lord’s Prayer, and really any other prayer sequence in scripture - it is a great reminder for us.  Our hearts have to be in the right place, and our requests in the right context, if we are going to pray effectively.  This sequence is for OUR benefit, so that when we ask, we are ready to hear from God.

As a side note - it is readings like this where we find some of the best evidence for supporting the idea that there were already books/manuscripts that were considered sacred.  Daniel is quoting various parts of our Bible in this prayer, as do many other prophets, and that really establishes that there were books that were already adopted into our faith way before we ever created and bound ‘the Bible’ that we carry around today.  In other words, most of what is in the Bible is in the Bible not because people put it there - but because it was already widely accepted that those were the legitimate manuscripts and teachings that actually happened and had wide acceptance.  That’s a big idea to grasp.

In reading this morning, I also found a mind-numbing amount of information and narrative around trying to reconstruct timelines based on Daniel’s numbers in here.  It is amazing the lengths to which people have gone to try to decipher these numbers.  After thumbing through the commentaries, what I find MOST fascinating is that, regardless of the commentary, there seems to be amazing predictive power in these words.  There are several plausible interpretations, but they are all accurate in describing events to come in the future from Daniel.  That’s amazing.

For today though, the big idea that I am left with really is this idea that Daniel gives us around prayer, around getting into the proper frame of reference when we pray.  And, once we are in the right frame of mind, we are in a place where we can hear from God.  It seems to me that there are few absolutes in terms of ‘if I do this, God will do that’; but when we pray, not with the right words, but with the right heart and mind, God always seems to show up in one way or another.  It may be a whisper that we hear, it may be a thought we coincidentally get in that moment, it may be a person we are reminded of, it may be a feeling of contentment, or it may be a feeling that we sense we are being called to some action...but, I really can’t recall a time I earnestly prayed like Daniel shows us and I didn’t get some kind of a response from God.  That’s encouraging.

This chapter outlines another vision of Daniel’s, but as I was reading it this morning, I really go a strong reminder that while it may look like oppressive leaders are taking over the world at times, or that political forces are wrecking our lives, or that certain events are destroying our hopes and dreams, we can know that God is in the backgrounding using the events to do His work.  We may not like the circumstances, but God will redeem them as a part of His plan for our lives and for our world.

We see that idea start to take shape here in verses 3-4, where the writer is passing judgement on this ram who is doing what he wants, taking what he wants; magnifying himself.   This king is later succeeded by ‘the great horn’, who does the same...living for his own vision and glory.  This one is believed to be Alexander the Great based on lots of historical work on these texts.

In verse 19 we see the reminder that there is an appointed time when this ‘trampling of God’s sanctuary’ will end.  God has a plan, which is reassuring in the midst of the madness here.  And,  I didn’t see specific mention of this idea, but we see here that Alexander the Great is believed to be ‘the great horn’ in this story.  Alexander the Great’s power was broken at the height of his success in/around 323 BC, and as is predicted in this vision, 200 years prior, his kingdom is broken into 4 parts, one of which we know as Antioch, which we know from the New Testament writings is ground-zero for the spread of Christianity after Jesus ascended into Heaven.

What I find most interesting is this though.  Alexander the Great dies, and there is about a 400 year period of time where we don’t hear from God.  Alexander laid into place 3 things that are really noteworthy in my mind - a common language (Koine Greek), a transportation system, and peace for the developed world.  These are THE very elements that set up the world for the spread of the message of Jesus - the gospel.  See, gospel means ‘good news’.  And, news isn’t something that arrive at through meditation and prayer; it is shared.  The fact that Jesus died on a Roman cross, in our place, for our sins and not His, and that he rose from the dead 3 days later and was seen again by hundreds of people is NOT spiritual news or a fairy tale.  It is the series of events that our faith rests on.  There are a lot of elements to our faith as Christians that are a little more etherial and personal, but this isn’t...this is just news.  Daniel was being told in this vision a story about how God would set up the series of events that would redeem all of mankind.  And, right here in verse 23, Daniel gets the timeline, which is admittedly not emotionally satisfying, because it isn’t clear to us: “And at the latter end of their kingdom, when the transgressors have reached their limit,...”.  So, we don’t get a date, but a framework...this is more literally translated as ‘when their sin is at its height’.  God came when our world was so broken that is was the only thing left to do.  How awesome is that?!?

What a reading today...deep stuff; heavy material, and we have to put our thinking caps on to draw from it.  But, what a great reminder we get - we are reminded that God is working in the background at all times; that’s my takeaway today.

Have you ever heard someone say, “I wish I could just hear God speak to me directly”?  I have...heck, I have thought that myself.  After a while though, in reading through scripture, it becomes evident that this may not be all it is cracked up to be...most of the time, when people interact with God, they end up scared out of their minds.

Likewise, there seems to be a ‘cost’ to receiving revelations when we look at the Old Testament.  Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Zechariah, and Daniel here in chapter 7 all report some kind of anxiety and/psychological distress when receiving an understanding of the future course of events in human history.  This would be another area in which we should be careful what we ask for...I am not sure we truly WANT to know what’s coming!  Haha

One thing that I will point out in reading chapter 7 is the similarity it bears to chapter 2.  In chapter 2 we see Daniel interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream; here in chapter 7, it is Daniel’s dream.

For me, when I cut through all of the imagery and the allusions, and when we set aside the attempts to connect ideas from various sources as to what all of these complex images are trying to convey in a subtle manner...I tend to come back to this 2-pronged idea that God has a plan, and that, try as I may, I am not likely to fully understand it.  That’s not a cop out on some of the rich content in this chapter, because there certainly is a lot of that, but it is an attempt not to miss the forest for the trees.  If we believe God is the Creator, then He also created communication and language, and I have to think that any desired meaning that we are suppose to derive from this text (or any other from scripture) should be reasonably ‘approachable’.  So, I think that’s my takeaway for today - that I would better appreciate the playing field on which God is performing, and that I would grasp the idea that really understanding everything that is going on isn’t an option for me in this life, because I am not equipped for that.  And, as such, I pray that I would be thankful for any revelation I DO receive from God, and that this humility about my place in the world would compel me to follow God’s command and live as He directs me...because I can’t really know what hangs in the balance of my faithful living.

Deep stuff today...the second half of Daniel takes us there!

This is a  crazy chapter in that it departs from this narrative story-telling and gets into some visions that Daniel, himself, is having.  As with much of this kind of material, like Revelation, there are challenges that confront us as readers.. On the one hand we may decide to omit these chapters from our study, preferring to confine ourselves to safer, more familiar parts of Scripture. On the other hand, we may become over-absorbed in working out our own theory of their significance and become unbalanced in the amount of attention we gives to them at the expense of other parts of Scripture.  We see people doing this with certain parts of scripture routinely, stretching and expanding on the meaning endless, sifting the language and the context until a silver nugget drops out of the material.  There is a term in statistics called ‘data mining bias’.  It refers to the idea that if you look at data long enough, you can find patterns in it that aren’t really there...they appear real, but there is no any real statistical significance to it.  I think that’s the risk we face when reading this material.  That’s the risk I face for sure.

In summary, the vision Daniel sees in this chapter is of four great beasts which come up out of the sea; three bear some resemblance to known animals, but the fourth is just awful, sprouting ten horns, one of which is singled out for more discussion. At that point Daniel perceives the throne-room of heaven and the awesome splendor of ‘the Ancient of Days’, seated to execute judgment on the beasts, whose kingdom was given to ‘one like a son of man’. ‘One of those who stood there’ answered the questions Daniel raised, but mysteries remain, and the vision which so deeply disturbed Daniel continues to concern us, ‘upon whom the end of the ages has come’

In that vein, let’s talk about this chapter for a moment.  And I love what my study Bible says right at the outset of this chapter:

Despite the various interpretations, there is one thing above all that the chapter is proclaiming quite unambiguously: the Most High is the reigning king in heaven and earth. There is an opposition to his rule, formidable in appearance and powerful, but all the time the Most High is in control, even when his opponents seem most successful (7:26). Therefore those who are allied with him triumph also. No wonder the chapter has been called ‘the center of gravity of the whole book’, and ‘one of the summits of scripture’.

So, tomorrow we will hit on a few technical elements in these words from Daniel, but today, let us reflect on God’s greatness.  Today, let us take a quick moment to look up at the sky and realize how small we are, and how big God is.  In closing, this entire reading reminds me of Isaiah 40: 28-31, famous and poetic verses among the best in all of scripture (in my opinion):

28 Have you not known? Have you not heard?  The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.  He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. 29 He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength.  30 Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted;  31 but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;  they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary;  they shall walk and not faint.

That’s the thought for today, before we dive off into the depths of Daniel - how great IS out God?