Today's Scripture Reading (August 31, 2026): Jeremiah 34
In my mind, I am always right: always.
I can have arguments with myself, and I always win. There is never really any
mystery; I know in advance that I am going to win. So, I argue with myself a
lot because, like some politicians, I like to win. I think that we are all just
a little like that. We are right. The more that we win arguments with ourselves,
the better we feel about our own position. As a result, our arguments become
about what we deserve and the rights that we have.
God designed the concept of grace
and placed it into the law he gave to Moses. Grace is basically the giving of
something to someone that is undeserved. He had called Israel to be his people
even though they had done nothing to earn that position. Israel didn’t deserve
the honor of being God’s people, although I think they convinced themselves,
basically by arguing with themselves, that they were worthy. God’s idea was
that Israel, the objects of God’s grace, would share that grace with everyone
around them. Because grace was what made Israel different, they would extend
grace to one another. So, slavery, an idea that was held by all of the other
countries in the world at the time, for Israel could only be a temporary state.
Grace insisted that an enslaved person needed to be released after a certain length
of time. Unfortunately, Israel argued with itself and won the argument. The
result of this self-argument was that the enslaved person didn’t deserve to be
set free, so why should they free them? Didn’t they have the right to do with
their slaves the same thing that other nations did with theirs? And they were
right; the enslaved person had done nothing to deserve to be set free. However,
neither had Israel done anything to deserve to be released from their slavery
in Egypt. This wasn’t about rights; Israel was supposed to be involved and
telling a story that could only be told by God’s grace.
Whenever our arguments focus on
what we deserve or what our rights might be, we leave the arena of faith and
grace. The whole idea behind Christianity is that we receive what we didn’t
deserve. God gives us what we don’t deserve, and our mission is to give the
world around us what it doesn’t deserve. We are all about second, third, and
fortieth chances. We are about grace; a grace that we extend freely because it
is freely given to us. We proclaim freedom not because any one of us deserves it,
but because God has spoken the story of grace over all of us.
Tomorrow's
Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 35
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